


when you work it out i'm worse than you

by derevko (sunshine_queen), iaintinapatientphase



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-29
Updated: 2016-10-03
Packaged: 2018-08-11 15:21:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 27,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7897777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunshine_queen/pseuds/derevko, https://archiveofourown.org/users/iaintinapatientphase/pseuds/iaintinapatientphase
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alexander's not supposed to acknowledge the flicker of possibility they both felt when they met, just a few minutes after he and Angelica did, the way Eliza’s interest must have been obvious, even if Angelica never indicated she noticed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> we had a lot of fun writing this, and we hope you like it too. as we like to say, team work makes the dream (nightmares) work.
> 
> title from "god put a smile upon your face" by coldplay. we fucking love coldplay. you should too.
> 
> come find us on tumblr: [emily](http://iaintinapatientphase.tumblr.com/) & [madeline](http://derevko.tumblr.com/)

The rush of presents and notes for Santa is long past, the kids asleep in bed for a few hours, Eliza, Angelica, Peggy, and Alex still downstairs, finishing another ill advised round of Irish coffee at 2:00AM. Church, as always, was the only sensible one, sticking to his unbreakable routine of bed by 11:00PM. He’s been that way as long as he and Eliza have been married, nine years of solid, steady, comfortingly predictable Church. Her sisters call him boring — lovingly, they insist — but Eliza’s always appreciated knowing exactly what to expect from him.

“We should probably go to bed, shouldn't we?” Angelica muses, head in Eliza's lap, feet in Alexander's. “It's getting pretty late.”

Peggy makes a sound of agreement from the floor. “I can't move. I ate too much of your kids’ candy.”

“Good, they're not supposed to have that much sugar anymore,” Alex says. “Remember Halloween, Ang? Philip puked and I thought Rach was gonna lose her mind.”

“That was the only day I've ever regretted having your children,” she says solemnly. “Bets? You tired?”

“I can't sleep yet,” Eliza says. “I'm gonna watch the log.”

“Until you pass out from boredom?”

“Angelica, it’s the Yule Log. It’s Christmas. It’s a thing.”

“There’s literally a fireplace right under the TV,” she says skeptically. “Why do you wanna watch some fake ass log burning on a thirty second loop?”

Eliza shakes her head, almost spills her drink pointing at the TV. “It’s not a loop! They really burn the whole thing!”

“It’s actually true,” Alex says. “I did Google it the Christmas right after we got married. She got drunk and I thought she was saying ‘You Log.’”

“Ha! See!” she says triumphantly. “Thank you, Alexander.”

“Please, boo, you know I got you,” he says, with that smile Eliza knows is only for her.

Peggy sits up suddenly, phone ringing loudly. “Hi, baby.”

“Tell Stevie we say ‘merry Christmas,’ and that we hope she's having fun wherever the fuck she is,” Eliza says, sugary sweet, over the sound of Angelica's laughter.

“Yeah! We miss her!”

“Fuck you guys,” Peggy mouths, glares at them as she goes upstairs to talk to her girlfriend who won't come to family holidays but will keep her on FaceTime til 4:00AM.

Eliza's just gotten herself under control when Angelica sets her off again, the two of them giggling like thirteen year olds.

“You two are awful,” Alex says, sipping his alcoholic coffee, fake disapproving.

“Oh, come on,” Eliza says. “We're no worse than you are.”

“Yeah!” Angelica echoes. “Shut up, babe.”

“Terrible,” he insists. “Both of you.”

“If you say so.” Angelica sits up, tugs lightly on the end of his ponytail. “I’m going to bed, nutjobs. Our kids are gonna be up at five and I would enjoy more than three hours of sleep.”

“Oh, come on, Gel, it's Christmas! We gotta stay up late and have Kodak family moments!”

“You are free to do so. I'm going to bed.”

“Oooh, she told you,” Alex teases.

Eliza hits him. “Make your wife be nice to me.”

“Nope.”

“You coming?” Angelica asks him.

He shakes his head. “Nah. Too much caffeine. I think Eliza might have the right idea.”

“Okay,” she says, stands up in a smooth, graceful motion, throws the blanket over Eliza’s head. “Dump that milk out so they think Santa came.”

“You got it,” Alexander promises. Eliza shoves the blanket off just in time to see him catch Angelica’s hand and press a kiss to the inside of her wrist. “I’ll be up in a few.”

“Goodnight, Angelica, I love you,” Eliza sing songs as she disappears up the stairs.

“Yeah, whatever,” she calls back, blows a kiss over her shoulder.

Alexander watches her go, soft eyes and a fond smile, turns back to Eliza when she’s out of sight. “So. You want gingerbread or the shitty sugar cookies with an entire thing of green color in them?”

“Gross,” she laughs. “We don’t actually have to eat them, you know. We can just break them up a little.”

“I guess, but isn’t that contrary to the whole ‘spirit of Christmas’ or whatever?”

“What they don’t know won’t hurt them,” Eliza says, holding out one of the gingerbread men.

“You’re probably right,” he agrees, takes it and bites the head clean off.

Eliza breaks the ugly green ones into pieces and goes to dump them deep in the trash where no kid could possibly find them, pours the last of the Bailey’s into her lukewarm coffee. If she’s gonna have all this caffeine, she should probably find a way to fall asleep, or something like that.

Alexander’s silent when she comes back in, none of his usual jokes or sudden outbursts or ideas that he just has to share with her. She knows that he gets like this, mostly second hand through Angelica. The brooding, and the picking fights, and the complete refusal to just talk about whatever’s bothering him — she hears about it whenever he drives Angelica to her absolute wits end, which isn’t all that infrequent.

Eliza loves Angelica, so much, but she’s always privately thought that she and Alex might not be good for each other. They’re too similar, in so many ways, both brilliant and ambitious and a little too… everything. Always getting in loud, dramatic arguments to show off. She worries for her sister, of course, but Angelica’s stable enough to know when she needs a drink and a good night’s sleep. Alex, with that crack in the foundation of his early life, has no idea how to cope, and with the way he and Angelica are — well. Eliza can see the potential for disaster a mile away, has been braced for it since their second date.

Alex talks to Eliza, though. She can usually tell when something’s bothering him, if not from his general demeanor than by the way he’ll seek her out to talk about it, on the outskirts of a family dinner or waiting for Rachel and Anne to be done with ballet. It makes her feel powerful, special, the way he looks at her with worshipful eyes and believes wholeheartedly that she can fix whatever may be wrong with him that day; the way he drops the bravado and the mania and the desperation for her alone. He may have married Angelica, but at least Eliza has that.

And she has now, tonight, the two of them the last ones up in the quiet house. It’s been a decade, there’s been plenty of time spent alone together, but this feels different. Special, almost, hazy at the edges with exhaustion and a little alcohol and the low light of the room. Like time out of time; a moment between the two of them she wasn’t meant to have, and got anyway.

Eliza sets her cup down on the end table, sits facing him and pulls up her knees to her chest. “What’s wrong with you?”

Alexander looks away from the TV, eyes wide. “Nothing,” he lies, very obviously.

She raises her eyebrows and he folds, instantly, like he always does. He doesn’t lie to her.

“It’s nothing, not really,” he says, shifting around. “I just… the holidays are hard sometimes.”

“Family stuff?”

He nods, takes a deep breath. “Philip asked me when we’re gonna go visit their other grandparents. Apparently his friend Adam alternates Christmases between here and Phoenix or something, I don’t know.”

“Oh,” Eliza says. She’s not sure what to do here, honestly. It’s not unusual that Alexander tells her things, but he rarely, if ever, will volunteer information about his dead family.

“I didn’t know what to say,” he says quietly.

“He’s still young. You don’t need to… share everything,” she tells him. “Give it time. He’s just curious.”

“I know. But I don’t like that it’s even an issue in the first place.”

“You can’t help that, and it’s not like it’s your fault.”

“Yeah. It’s just…” he trails off, tips his head further back against the couch. “I can’t do that for them. I can’t give them a real family the way that you guys had. I can buy them stuff, and I'm here, at least, but they’re never gonna know who their other cousins are, or their family history, none of that. That’s not something I can do.”

“That’s not your fault, though,” she says gently. “And it’s not like they don’t have any family. They have you, and Angelica, and all of us.”

“I know that,” he says, reaches out a hand that she catches in her own. “I love that, I really do. But it’s just not the same.”

“They aren't missing anything, Alex. You're doing the best you can, are you not?”

“I know, but —”

“That's all you can do,” she says firmly. “You're a great father. I promise.”

“I guess,” he says, considering. “You're right. Of course you are.” All at once he relaxes; sinks into the couch, legs falling open the slightest bit. He turns his head to the side and looks at her. “Thank you.”

“Please. It's nothing.”

“No, it's not. You just—” his fingers tighten around hers. “You make everything good. Better.”

The words aren't so unfamiliar — _that Eliza Schuyler, she's such a good girl!_ — but they sound different, coming from Alex. She knows he means it, wholeheartedly believes it, and for once, it doesn't feel like she's accepting a compliment meant for someone else.

She can feel it before it happens, can sense the change in the way he's looking at her, can see the possibility coiled in the way he holds himself. Eliza knows with perfect clarity that she could make this stop if she wanted, go to bed and pretend like she didn't feel it, too. If that’s what she wanted, instead of wanting him. Instead of hoarding these kinds of moments, of treasuring the way he’s always treated her like something special. She’s wanted him for years, since the night both she and Angelica met him the first time, since they chose each other and Eliza shut up and let them.

Alex leans forward, weight on his hand making the cushion dip underneath her knee, and before he can actually do it, she fists a hand in his sweater and pulls him the rest of the way in to kiss her.

There's another moment, between that first kiss and the second, where she could stop them again, a moment that she barely notices as it passes. She kisses him again, and again, and through the shifting and the grabbing and the overwhelming need to get closer, she ends up on top of him, knees on either side of his hips. It’s not enough, and he must feel the same way; he pulls her closer with both hands, head tilting back against the couch, lips sighing open under hers.

He kisses her slowly, unhurried, touching her all over — up her thigh and the back of her neck and holding her hair back from her face so he can kiss her again and again and again — like they have all the time in the world. Even when she leans back enough to pull her shirt over her head — he watches with wide eyes, though he’s seen her in a bathing suit hundreds of times — he slides his hands up her sides and to her chest so slowly she can practically count the seconds, out of step with the rapid beating of her heart. She's not nervous, not unsure, and there's nothing hesitant in the way he's touching her, firm and insistent and still not enough. She tightens her grip on his shoulders, holds her breath while he moves his mouth down her neck, across her collarbone, and down further, fingers tangling with hers on the clasp of her bra.

By mutual, unspoken agreement they eventually end up horizontal, both of them twisting out of their pants — she doesn’t know about him, but her fingers are entirely steady. He stops for a second, the rhythm of it paused while he gives her a questioning look, hand spread over the inside of her thigh.

She doesn’t think about the absurdity of it, how strange it is to have sex on her parent’s couch when she didn’t even do that when she was a teenager. She just wants to, she wants and wants and wants and _wants_ him, and she’s gotten her chance and she’s going to take it. “Yeah,” she says, runs a hand down his back. “Come on.”

She's breathing hard and he's saying “Eliza, Eliza, Eliza,” into the curve of her shoulder while he pushes into her, and she can't find the right words but she knows, can feel the easy rightness in it when she says “Alex, please,” and he kisses her again and starts to move. It’s good, it’s so good, like she knew it would be. And that’s the thing — she knew it would be like this. She knew that on a fundamental level, she and Alex would work, and do work, and that it's more than the way their bodies fit together or a moment of understanding when everyone else is asleep.

There's no lightbulb or any other kind of grand, sweeping moment when she comes, Alexander just after, just a sense of pieces finally falling into place. Like the one and only Christmas morning after Angelica convinced her to find their hidden gifts a few weeks before — the total satisfaction of getting everything she wanted.

He shifts just enough to not rest all of his weight on her, but stays close, arms tight around her, her forehead against his shoulder until she starts to feel her eyes slip shut, finally relaxed enough to fall asleep.

Eliza turns her head just enough to kiss him lightly on the cheek, pushes him over onto his back and sits up, silently grabs her shirt. “I’m gonna go to bed,” she says, a weird calm settling over her while she pulls it over her head, picks her bra up off the floor. “Don’t forget to dump out that milk.”

Alexander blinks dumbly up at her, mouth slack and slightly swollen. “I won’t,” he says, a bit bewildered, but she can’t really do that right now.

She nods, climbs over him and off the couch, careful not to trip on her pants, still tangled around her left ankle. She doesn't bother to button them, just pulls them up and avoiding his eyes, tugs her underwear out from under his elbow and puts them in her pocket. “Cool. Well, goodnight.”

“Night,” he says vaguely, sits up to watch her go up the stairs. She pauses at the top and puts a hand over her mouth, makes herself count backwards from ten, listening for any sounds of stirring. She hasn’t woken anyone up, thank god. The house is as silent as it should be at 3:00AM.

Eliza knows the hallway well enough to make it to the bathroom without turning on any lights, can get the water in the shower hot without making the pipes creak loud enough to wake everyone up, digs her preferred body wash out from behind Peggy’s six hundred travel bottles. She almost skips washing her hair — she doesn’t want to get the pillow wet and bother Church — but she might as well, tomorrow will be a long day.

She folds her clothes carefully, wraps her towel tight around herself, and goes quietly down the hall to the bedroom where Church is fast asleep, the baby in the pack-and-play at the foot of the bed. She throws her dirty clothes in with the rest, pulls on a tshirt and fresh underwear and quietly gets in bed next to her husband. He stirs, just barely; Eliza kisses him on the cheek and falls fast asleep.

\---------

“Alright, kids,” she half hears Church saying, “You can wake Mummy up, gently.”

“Mommy,” Johnny says, half an inch from her face, “Mommy, it’s Christmas.”

“Santa came,” Anne adds, pushing in front of her brother to climb next to Eliza, “There are so many presents.”

Eliza opens her arms to her children, who can stand being hugged for three seconds and no longer. “What time is it?” she asks her husband, looking over John and Anne’s heads as they answer, “A million o’clock,” and “Morning,” respectively.

“Six-thirty,” Church answers, bouncing Ricky. “They were generous, this year.”

“Mommy, Philip and Rachel and Alexander are _up already_ ,” John says desperately. “They’re going to open presents first!”

“They are not,” she tells him, sitting up. “No one is opening any presents until everyone is downstairs, you know the rules.”

“They’re opening their _stockings_ ,” Anne says in distress, “ _without us_.”

“You’ll be opening yours soon enough. Have you brushed your teeth?”

The kids chorus that they have, bouncing up and down, and Eliza looks to her husband. “Will you take them down? I’ll only be a moment.”

“Of course,” Church says, and goes around the bed to give her a kiss. “Happy Christmas, darling.”

“Happy Christmas,” she tells him, and she keeps the smile on her face until the door has closed behind them.

She goes to the bathroom to brush her teeth and wash her face, looking at herself in a mirror for a long moment. She doesn’t look any different than she did at dinner last night. She looks at her neck from all angles, and pulls down the neckline of her shirt to check that there are no love bites.

She goes back to her room to pull on leggings and and the crimson sweater that will look good in Christmas morning photos, and puts in the earrings Church gave her three Christmases ago. Her wedding ring set sparkles, and her hair dried nice and straight. She looks normal.

When she goes downstairs Ricky runs over to her to clutch her around her knees, and she has no sooner picked him up than Angelica is handing her a mug of coffee. “No Bailey’s ‘til after noon,” she tells her.

“What Mom and Dad don’t know won’t hurt them,” Peggy whispers, mini bottle in her hand. Eliza shakes her head.

“That is a terrible habit to get used to,” she says honestly.

“Ugh,” Peggy scoffs eloquently, “It’s Christmas. The kids are already eating chocolate from their stockings.”

“I thought we were under the impression that Santa wasn’t giving candy in stockings anymore,” Eliza says to the adult population of the room, as if the younger generation of adults hadn’t pilfered through the stash last night, and Daddy looks guilty.

“It’s possible that Santa reconsidered, seeing as these children were all so good this year,” he says. He has Rachel in his lap, showing him the contents of her stocking, chocolate smeared around her mouth.

“The cinnamon rolls are in the oven,” Mommy announces as she comes in from the kitchen, “So we can start.”

Peggy looks around. “I mean, I’m cool with it, but shouldn’t we include the guys?”

“Oh, sweetie, you didn’t hear it last night, but your father and I— we heard Santa’s arrival last night. We were very careful to not move while we could hear him, of course—” her mother directs this at the grandchildren, who are looking at her with varying degrees of shock, “but once we had heard him ride off, we saw that he had left some rather big gifts on the porch. I think that’s where the others are.”

“Did we have some really good kids this year?” Alexander bellows on cue from the foyer, and there are bikes for all the children wheeled in by Church and Alexander, some dusted in snow that had blown onto the bicycles that had sat on the porch.

After that, it’s chaos— the bikes are exclaimed over, and Santa was also thoughtful enough to have provided helmets for everyone. Church brings over the presents labeled ‘Richard,’ and Eliza holds them as the baby tears into them, happier, at eighteen months, with the mess he’s making than any of the gifts he’s received, and Annie and Johnny hold up everything they get with such complete delight and wonder that Eliza forgets that they’ve already eaten the recommended amount of sugar before 8:00AM.

The kids crash after breakfast, all but Johnny and Philip zonked out in front of the Rudolph movie. The big boys are comparing their hauls, and playing together sweetly. Ricky is cuddled up with his grandmother as the adults open their gifts. Eliza is sitting on the floor, leaning against Church’s knees. Everything is idyllic and lovely, aside from the fact that every time her eyes meet Alexander’s, she can actually feel his stress level skyrocketing.

 _Be cool,_ she tries to telegraph with her eyes the first few times, but then she gives up.

“Successful Christmas,” Angelica says as they shove wrapping paper into a garbage bag later, “No idea how we’re going to fit everything we got, plus three bikes in the car, but successful nevertheless.”

“Make Peg take one,” Eliza suggests, “And it was.”

“What were you and Alex doing up so late last night? You must be dead right now.”

“The coffee did wonders,” Eliza says smoothly, “We were talking. Philip asked about his other grandparents, and you know how he can get.”

Angelica nods. “He’s so…” she exhales, shrugging. “Sensitive. I mean, of course he is, and understandably, but he gets so cagey if you bring it up, and if you say the wrong thing he just— I’m glad he talks to you.”

She can hear what Angelica doesn’t say at the end, what the family always appends when they think she’s being good, the sing-songed “Saint Eliza” she’s endured throughout her life. “It was no big deal,” she says. “I’m going to get another garbage bag.”

They wouldn’t think she was so good if she announced what she had done, she thinks viciously, and realizes just as quickly that they would. Saint Eliza, coming clean, unable to live with her guilt. What a sweet, honest little soul she was! She rips a garbage bag out of the box and shakes it until it opens, the only sharp sound in the house.

\---------

It’s the Churches’ year to host the New Year's Eve party, and everyone is there by seven so they can take pictures of the kids while they’re all still awake. They have dinner, just as a family, and the kids are mostly asleep in the living room by the time their friends start arriving— some of Church’s business associates, a few family friends, some Schuyler and van Rensselaer relatives. They carry the kids upstairs to Johnny and Annie’s bedrooms, and Eliza marvels at the fact that when she puts Ricky down in his crib, she doesn’t need to bring down the baby monitor like she had just the year before.

The crowd is familiar enough that Eliza doesn’t have to do much hostessing beyond making sure that there’s food and drinks to go around, and her sisters help with the appetizers while Church makes drinks at the wet bar they had put into the house when they bought it.

“Lovely,” he says, calling her attention as she walks by. She leans against the marble counter as he finishes shaking a martini, pours it for her cousin who has a lifestyle blog, and hands it to her.

“So glad you could make it, Louise,” Eliza says with a smile as her cousin takes the martini and leaves, and she rolls her eyes as she turns to face her husband.

“You’re wicked,” he says amiably.

“Did you at least make it a double? She needs it.”

“She asked for extra olives, so I gave her four.”

“Good enough. Did you need anything?”

“Do I need an excuse to want to see you?” He pulls her to him, and she puts her arms around his waist, breathing in his cologne. It’s quieter in this room of the house, away from the sound system playing orchestral covers of pop music that Peggy found, and Eliza leans into him.

“You don’t,” she agrees, “But I think you have one this time.”

“I do, actually.” He pulls back to look at her. “I told some of my work chums I’d find that beautiful old scotch we brought back from Scotland, the Macallan.”

“Are they going to appreciate it as much as you do?”

“It’s possible I may yet refine their palates. I was hoping that while I was doing that, you could check on the champagne and make sure they’re all cool enough.”

She kisses him. “I can do that. Go introduce your friends to the scotch of their dreams.”

Eliza goes to their mostly-dark kitchen and crouches to check in the wine fridge for the bottles of champagne. It always looks like more than they’ll need, and every year they have barely enough for the thirsty crowd. She only has a mild buzz now, her two gin and tonics mostly burned off from checking in on people, making small talk, and reminding her cousin that, yes, this is her home and no, she hadn’t thought of remodeling the guest bathroom they had only remodeled a year ago. When she stands, Alexander is on the other side of the counter.

“Don’t do that,” she exclaims, startled, “I did not expect you.”

“I need to talk to you,” he says, at least four drinks in.

“You don’t,” Eliza tells him, her hand to her chest. “Church is pouring his stupidly expensive scotch for his work people, go get a glass.”

“I don’t want to talk to _Church_ ,” Alexander says, coming around the corner of counter. His face is mostly in the shadows, now. “I want to talk to you. I _need_ to talk to you.”

“You need to eat something. Do you want cheese and some crackers, or an apple?”

“Why do you keep trying to distract me?”

“Because you’re being ridiculous, and you don’t seem to realize it, so you better sober up.”

“It’s a New Year, Eliza.”

“It’s not for another half hour. Would you like me to peel the apple for you, would that help? Green or red?”

She opens the refrigerator door as she asks, and she hears him step closer to her as she reaches into the crisper. “Eliza—”

“Stop it,” she hisses. “Everyone we know is here. You need to pull yourself together.” She pulls out an apple, red, and puts it in his hand forcefully, letting the door close.

He looks down. “What if I wanted a green apple?”

“Get out of my kitchen,” she tells him, but she doesn’t have to be forceful anymore because he’s backing down, and moving away from her.

“What’s your resolution this year, Eliza?” he asks, biting into the apple.

“To serve less alcohol at parties I throw. Yours?”

“Eat more fruits. You know. The body is a temple and all that.”

He’s smiling, and joking, like he wasn’t about to say something stupid, back to being fun, playful Alex. “Get out of my kitchen,” she says again, and he does without looking back.

At midnight, she kisses her husband and he kisses Angelica, and no one notices that they don’t embrace one another as everyone else in the family does.

\---------

When the doorbell rings a few days later, she already knows it's him. For a brief, insane minute, she considers ignoring it.

“Hi,” Alex says, when she gets it together and opens the door, strides right in, barely pausing to wipe the snow off his shoes.

“Hi,” Eliza says, instead of _get the fuck out of here, I don't want to have this conversation right now, or ever, really_. It's 11:00 AM, and she hoped he’d be too typically type-A to ditch work to come over, but she should have known. Church spends all day Tuesday and most Thursdays at his office downtown, doing God knows what with God knows how much money; the baby’s asleep, John and Anne are at school. He knew she'd be alone. She wishes she had found somewhere else to be.

“Can we talk?” He’s across the foyer, unwinding the long scarf she watched him unwrap on Christmas Eve — paper labelled “Daddy” in Philip’s crooked handwriting — cheeks red from the cold. She still feels like he’s standing too close.

She could say no, she desperately does want to. She doesn’t want to talk to him, she wants to forget about it, but she’s not sure how to get out of it without the buffer of the whole family around. “I can’t, right now,” she lies. “I have to —”

“ _Eliza_ ,” he interrupts, looking fairly horrified. “We need to talk about this.”

“Fine,” she says, if only to get him to stop looking at her like she stole something from him. She supposes this is inevitable; he's not one to let things lie, and he's probably got a whole speech prepared anyway. “Talk, then.”

“About what happened,” he begins, looks to her expectantly. “On Christmas Eve.”

She feels a stab of irritation — Can't he just get it over with? — and takes the opportunity to go into the front room and sit on the antique couch they bought when in Hong Kong last year, hands folded neatly in her lap. It feels appropriately formal.

Alexander follows, wary, sits as far as humanly possible in the armchair Church favors, this mornings newspaper folded neatly on the table beside the right arm, as always. Eliza wants to tell him to get up, doesn’t like the images of Alex and Church all mixed together in her head, but it's probably not worth it. “About that night,” he tries again. “What we did.”

“I was there, I remember,” she says, annoyed. “You know you can say ‘had sex,’ I'm not an infant.”

He blanches a little. She supposes Alex isn’t used to her being anything less than perfectly agreeable with him, but that’s her own fault for not getting over her stupid crush ten years ago when she should have. “Okay,” he stalls, getting himself back on the script he so obviously prepared. “Well, it can't happen again.”

“I know.”

“I mean it,” he says, almost frighteningly intense, fingers tapping in double time against the arms of her husband's chair. “It can’t happen again.”

“I know that,” she says, frustrated. She can hear him, she knows, she doesn’t need to have this conversation with her son asleep upstairs. “Can you not sit there?”

He blinks at her. “Sorry?”

“You can sit anywhere else, I don’t care, just not there, please,” she says, quickly, before the last shreds of her control on the situation slip out of her hands.

He bolts up, backs away until he’s standing in the center of the room. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” she manages. “Just. Continue. Let’s get this over with.”

“‘Get this _over_ with?’ This is a big deal, Eliza.” He starts pacing. “It was a mistake, and it was wrong, and we can't just pretend like everything is okay. It's not.”

Eliza fights back an eye roll or another bratty comment — he's serious, and the situation is serious, she knows she has to deal with it some time. It’s just easier to be mad at him for being condescending than for making her talk about this in the first place. “I _know_ , Alexander, that's not what I'm saying. This conversation is unnecessary. We're on the same page.”

“Good,” he says with relief, having the nerve to sound like she's the one putting him out.

“Great,” she says briskly, stands up and smoothes down her shirt. “You should probably be at work.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I have to pick up Johnny and Annie in an hour,” she lies. He narrows his eyes at her but doesn’t press it, even though their kids all go to the same school and he absolutely knows that they don't get out until after 3:00PM. “So. Are we done?”

“No, Eliza, we’re not done,” he says, aghast. “We have to decide what we’re going to do.”

She can’t help it, she laughs, a short, sharp sound of disbelief. “‘What we’re going to do?’ There’s nothing to figure out. We’re going to forget about it, and it’ll be like it never happened.”

“I can’t do that.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I can’t forget about it, I can’t just see her every day and pretend like nothing happened,” he says, every word fueling Eliza’s growing sense of horror.

“You have to.”

“I can’t lie to her.”

“You can and you will,” she says bluntly. “Telling her would be cruel.”

He shakes his head, the stiff formality, the forced calm with which he started fracturing. “Eliza, I can’t — we can’t — she’s my _wife_ , Eliza —”

“She's _my_ sister.”

“— and I _cheated_ on her, with you, and I can’t just sit there every day and lie to her like nothing happened.”

“You have to. Telling her is _not_ an option, Alex, do you understand?” She has to restrain herself from grabbing him and shaking him until he promises not to do something stupid. “Angelica is _my_ sister, and you do _not_ get to hurt her like this.”

“I can’t lie,” he says again, working himself up. “I won’t lie to her, I love her, I can’t —”

“If you love her,” Eliza says, forcing the words through the stabbing pain in her chest ( _if_ you love her, if _you_ love her, Eliza loves her sister more than she knows how to say), “you’ll never say anything. You’ll deal with it, and keep your mouth shut, because if she finds out it will ruin her life.”

“I have to,” he insists. “I can’t lie to her.”

“What happens if you confess?” she demands. “Both of us have to get divorced. You have to move out and only see your kids on the weekends.”

“I —”

“No! This isn't about you, which I know is a new concept,” she says furiously. “You two might be married, but Angelica is my _sister_. She'll never speak to me again if she finds out. My parents probably won't either, and God only knows what Peggy will do. And I'll have to —” she has to stop and shut her eyes for a moment, keep herself from spinning out of control. “Church will find out, and it’ll break his heart, and you are _not_ going to do that. Don’t you fucking dare.”

Alexander glowers at her, accusing. “I don’t understand how you just don’t feel bad.”

“Of course I feel bad!” she yells, voice echoing in the empty house. She holds her breath, listens for Ricky, but hears nothing. She looks back at Alex, still staring at her like he’s never seen her before, and starts again. “But telling won't help anything. I won't let y— _this_ ruin my life.”

“But what if they find out?”

“They're not going to,” she answers dismissively.

“But —”

“They're not going to!”

“That's not helpful, Elizabeth,” he snaps, that sneering, condescending tone she can’t stand, using her full name like he’s reprimanding her for something. “You don't know that we won't get caught.”

“Yes, I do,” she insists. “Because I'm not going to say anything, and neither are you. It'll be like it never happened.”

“Still. They could find out.”

“How could they possibly? They have absolutely no reason to suspect anything.”

“Jesus Christ,” he half laughs, covering his face with his hands. “How do you even _know_ that? How can you be so sure?”

“I just do,” she says, to silence. She knows this, because she knows that everyone knows Eliza would never, ever, cheat on her adoring husband — she loves him too much. Eliza would never, ever, sleep with her big sister’s husband — she'd never be that cruel.

Eliza's never felt like the person other people think she is, she's never felt comfortable accepting compliments for being kind, or selfless, or good. If she was really so good, she wouldn't have harbored a crush on Angelica’s husband for years, nor would she have counted on and encouraged his own feelings for her. She wouldn't have stayed down there on Christmas Eve in the first place, wanting a private moment with him. She wouldn't have taken advantage of both Church and Angelica’s absolute faith in her, flirting with Alexander in front of everyone for as long as they both can remember. She wouldn't have fucked him, or wanted to, and she wouldn't have done it in her parent’s house with her children, husband, and sister upstairs.

Except that she would, and she did, and the worst part is that she can't even find it in herself to feel that bad. She knew what she was doing on Christmas Eve, no one tricked her or pushed her into it. She wanted Alexander — wants, present tense — and she saw an opportunity and she took it. She knows she shouldn’t have done it, but she knew what she was doing, and she decided before he even kissed her (or she, him — she knows she made it deliberately unclear) in the first place that this is something that she can live with. She knows, without a shadow of a doubt, that unless she or Alexander were to tell them, their spouses won’t find out — neither Church nor Angelica would ever suspect her of this. Alexander might cheat on Angelica, sure, that they'd believe, but neither would believe it of her. Eliza wouldn’t do that.

If for some reason they found out, she knows they'd both forgive her, too. She doesn't want that kind of unconditional love — the power of it scares her — but she has it, and she'll use it. They’d blame Alex for seducing her, for taking advantage, for corrupting their darling Eliza that doesn’t even exist. They’d be mad at her, sure, but she knows she could cry and apologize and they’d forgive her. Angelica and Church would forgive her anything.

Alexander groans, muffled into his hands. “I can’t do this.”

“Yes, you can,” Eliza says. “If you can't believe it, then you're just going to have to trust me, because _I know_ it's going to be fine. Can you do that?”

He slumps a little, and Eliza holds her breath, waiting for his reaction. She knows he’ll believe her, she knows he’ll listen — he always does. “It’s not gonna happen again, and you and I are going to stop talking about it, and we’re just going to forget about it,” she says, slowly, deliberately. “Don’t be selfish.”

“You’re right,” he says, nodding slowly. “I know you’re right. I’m sorry about all of this.”

“Don't worry about it,” she says. “You have to leave now. Go back to work and be normal.”

“I mean it, Eliza, I'm sorry,” he says, earnest and sincere and looking her right in the eye. “I'm sorry you have to deal with this.”

“It’s fine, Alex.”

“No, it’s not. It was wrong and I’m _sorry_ ,” he says, voice breaking.

“Okay, I know, we did something bad, but it’s fine, I promise, just — don’t… you don’t need to apologize to me, it’s fine,” she says awkwardly, half reaching out to touch him like she would have before, only catching herself at the last second, fingers curling into a fist.

“No, I was wrong. I shouldn’t have done that.”

Eliza has no idea how to respond to that, but he's looking at her like _that_ , and waiting for something she doesn't know how to give. She shrugs helplessly. “I don't know what you want me to say. I'm not the one you should be apologizing to.”

A shadow passes over his face. “Well, I can't say anything to _her_ , but I still shouldn't have involved you.”

“You didn’t…” she struggles for a second, searching for whichever of his capital-I issues they’ve landed on this time. “You didn’t take advantage of me, Alexander,” she tries— he flinches and she knows she's gotten it right. “Not in the slightest. It’s actually really insulting that you’re acting like you did just because you want to guilt spiral or whatever.”

“Sorry,” he says defensively. “That’s not what I was trying to do.”

“No? You keep saying ‘I,’ like I wasn’t there, too,” Eliza says, crossing her arms over her chest. “I was there. The whole time.”

“I shouldn’t have —”

“Shouldn’t have what?” she interrupts. “No, you shouldn’t have kissed me. You definitely shouldn’t have fucked me on my parents’ couch with our entire family upstairs. I shouldn’t have done that either.”

“I’m just trying to say that I’m sorry for what I did, okay?”

“And I’m saying don’t apologize to me, because you didn’t do anything that I didn’t want you to.”

That shuts him up, _finally_. “Oh,” he says blankly, hands dangling at his sides.

“‘Oh,’” she mimics. “Seriously?”

“Eliza —”

“For someone so smart, you can really be a fucking idiot sometimes,” she says, barely biting back the edge of hysterical laughter. “Are you kidding me? You really want to pretend like you don't know I wanted it as badly as you? What kind of self-righteous, self-important bullshit is that?”

He swallows. “No, I — I know.”

“Exactly,” she says. “It's not like it came out of nowhere. It was always… like that.”

“It was,” he agrees, eyes flicking from her face and down and back up. “I know. We both —”

“I know” she says, trying to keep her voice steady through the sudden shift in the room. It's just that she's already done this, she's already broken this rule, and if no one's ever going to find out —

“Eliza,” he says, and he's gotten very close.

If no one's ever going to find out, it's almost like it never happened at all.

She looks down, at his feet next to hers. It's funny how the years and years of _wanting_ didn't fade after the first time. If anything, it's stronger now, sharpened by the memory of his hands on her skin and the full force of his attention for _once_ focused fully on her. Safer, stronger, a maybe that became something real.

She looks back up, and he's staring at her mouth, but he's not doing anything. She can decide this time; she gets to choose. “Alex,” she whispers, and watches him shudder.

This time, Eliza’s absolutely sure that she's the one that kisses him first.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She looks it up later, the precise definitions of the two words. Jealous, fiercely protective of one’s possessions. Envious, the desire to possess something that belongs to another. Alexander always was exact in his semantics.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FYI: The Hall of Springs and The Casino are venues in Saratoga Springs, New York, a few miles from Schuylerville, where the Schuylers had their farm north of Albany.
> 
> thank you all very much for reading and commenting! if you have any specific concerns you’d like addressed, please come to our tumblrs! we’d love to discuss: [madeline](http://derevko.tumblr.com/) & [emily](http://iaintinapatientphase.tumblr.com/)

“I used to be so jealous of this,” Alex says one Tuesday morning. They’re in bed, his arm under her neck, his fingers just playing with her left hand, and now he’s touching the stone of her engagement ring.

“That’s silly. I’m sure if you ask, Church will give you one for Christmas.”

“I mean, look at it. It’s ridiculous.”

Eliza does look at it, her head tilting against his. “I don’t know, I’m used to it.”

“You can’t be used to it. It’s like a million carats. Is it really Grace Kelly’s engagement ring?”

She pulls away to face him. “That’s your fascination with it, if it was Grace Kelly’s engagement ring?”

“He’s not related to the royal family of Monaco is he? He can’t be. Then why did Prince Albert get a boat that year and why does Church get so private when he’s asked?”

“Because it’s vulgar to talk about the particulars of an heirloom engagement ring unless it’s your heirloom, I imagine.”

“Only rich people think it’s vulgar to talk about money.”

“Hm,” Eliza says noncommittally. Alex always talks as though he doesn’t have money himself, as though working for it gives him different credibility. “Why were you jealous?”

“Hm?” He echoes, tearing his eyes away from the ring.

“Of this, of my ring?”

“Because that would look great on my hand, don’t you think?” He puts his hand under hers.

“You do have the fingers for it,” she says, and she can just see the lecherous thoughts forming in his head, “But that doesn’t explain why you’d be jealous. Is it because you—” She stops before she says _couldn’t buy it for Angelica_ , because it’s harsh and borderline cruel. Instead she lets it linger in the space between them.

“You’re right,” he says, saving her, “jealous isn’t the right word.”

“What is the right word, then?”

“Envious,” he says.

She looks it up later, the precise definitions of the two words. Jealous, fiercely protective of one’s possessions. Envious, the desire to possess something that belongs to another. Alexander always was exact in his semantics.

\---------

It’s 25 degrees and a beautifully sunny day, and she’s at the Schuyler-Hamilton house with Church and the kids. The kids have been playing outside for a good half hour, their cheeks rosy with cold, bright eyed in their colorful jackets and hats. Eliza had gone inside to start making the hot chocolate for when the kids came in— which, judging by the amount of times Ricky had taken a few steps before falling to the ground like a starfish and laughing until his father pulled him up, would be soon.

Alexander had gone in five minutes before her, claiming first that everyone else was crazy, and secondly that his blood wasn’t meant for this weather, to the jeers of the adults.

“God, how much longer can they stand it?” he asks as he enters the kitchen, still rubbing his hands together like he had just come in from the cold.

“I give it another ten minutes for the kids,” she answers, not looking away from the pot on the stove. “I’d give Angelica another half hour, you know how she is.”

“‘Let’s go for a sleigh ride in February in Quebec,’” he mimicks. “I damn near froze to death.”

“That was your own fault, letting her pick the route. She’d do the Iditarod if she could have cell phone reception on the course.”

“She is commanding, she could probably get a team of dogs to mush,” Alex muses, coming to stand carelessly close to her. She bumps him with her hip in warning.

He pays her no mind. “Liza, I have a question.”

“No, you may not have the marshmallows, they’re for the kids.”

“An actual question, thanks, but that was a good guess. What are you doing for Valentine’s day?”

She looks at him. “I’m celebrating with my husband, as one would expect.”

“Obviously. I meant specifically.”

She looks back to the pot. The cocoa is just starting to form bubbles around the edges, so she whisks it. “Oh, you know. Stuff.”

“No, don’t be vague, when you’re vague that means it’s excellent.”

“You do have something planned, right? It’s this week.”

“Of course I have something planned! I just want to compare it against what Church planned.”

“How do you know I didn’t plan it?”

“You’re not the romantic one. You’re the one who says, ‘oh, no, babe, we couldn’t,’ except for that time you eloped.”

“Which _was_ romantic.”

“I’ll take your word for it. Anyway, what did Church plan?”

She lowers the heat. “Get down the mugs,” she tells him. “He just… hired a private chef to make us dinner, and then a horse-drawn carriage is going to pick us up and take us to the helicopter tour we’re taking of the city. It should be nice.”

The mugs clatter to the counter top. “Nice? It should be _nice_? That should be _perfect_.”

Eliza hums her agreement. “I know, it’s supposed to warm up before tomorrow. You can put the marshmallows in the mugs.”

He does so. “What would Angelica like?”

“You just told me I’m not the romantic one. Ask Church.”

“I don’t want to ask Church,” he says plaintively.

“You can’t keep avoiding him. It’s hurting his feelings.”

“I’ve done worse things,” he says honestly, and she glares over her shoulder. “I clearly won’t tell him that. Will he wonder if you get roses from a mystery admirer the day of?”

“He will, and you better not. And you better not for Angelica, either, she’ll think you only thought of it the morning of and panicked.”

“But then you can tell her it was premeditated and about the bulk of this conversation.”

“Yes, she’ll love that the only contribution I made to her Valentine’s Day was the suggestion of flowers. You seriously have nothing planned?”

“I have a bill going before committee in two weeks! It’s taken up a lot of my time!”

“Then you better have something amazing planned for your anniversary— _Alexander_ ,” she says to his expression of embarrassment. “Oh my god. You need to talk to Church. He knows people, he can fix this.”

“He fixes everything,” Alex grumbles, chucking marshmallows into the mugs.

“He is good at that,” Eliza agrees, “And he can salvage this situation, I’m sure of it. Just be normal to him.”

“Believe it or not, I try to be normal to him all the time.”

“I don’t. Call the kids in.”

Alexander moves to stand very, very close to her. “In a moment.”

She turns the heat off the stove and splashes the vanilla in, stirring it. “It’ll get cold,” she warns, not looking at him, but she doesn’t move away, and she puts the pot down on the counter so she can just brush his fingertips with hers before going to the back door to call out for their families.

On Valentine’s Day, Alex sends a group message to her, Peggy and their mother, wishing them a happy Valentine’s day with the heart in a ribbon emoji, and nothing else.

Angelica calls her the next morning. “Did you get motion sick over the city?”

“That only happened once and I was seven, can we let it go?”

“As the person who was sitting next to you, no, we can't.”

“I did not, and it was really beautiful. The city was all lit up, and Church was reminding me of things we’d done in different places— it was sweet. What did you guys wind up doing?”

“I thought we’d have a night in, honestly, because of the crowds and nonsense, but Alex got tickets to that new thing at the MoMA. It ended up being not totally packed, it was nice. We got a drink after.”

“That’s fun!”

“It was,” she says. “You know we’re not really Hallmark-card Valentine’s people, but it was really nice.”

“And thoughtful,” Eliza adds.

“Yeah, it was,” Angelica says, sounding gentle and happy, just as she should.

\---------

With his boarding school upbringing and years of ballroom dance lessons, Church is a hit at her parents’ fortieth anniversary party. He hasn’t sat down since the speeches, dutifully whirling all Mommy’s friends around the dance floor, perfectly charming, catching her eye over their shoulders, grinning when she blew him a kiss.

Eliza had been dreading this, the attention and the pressure of speaking in front of everyone; all the potential for disaster, but it ended up alright. The Schuylers have been holding events in the State Room for years, and the staff is great; everything went perfectly. Angelica handled the speaking, big sister as always. She wrote the whole thing on her lunch break last week, emailed it to them with holes labeled _Peggy anecdote here_ and _Eliza talks grandparent stuff ~45 sec_. She set it up perfectly, like she always does: there wasn't a dry eye in the room, and the three of them spoke in easy, natural turns. Thank god for Angelica.

Thank god for Angelica, she thinks to herself, watching her mingle easily with everyone from the family accountant to Louise’s awful mother in law, being gracious and charming and best of all, engaging enough that no one notices that the other two Schuyler sisters fled immediately after: Peggy to the bar, Eliza to an empty table on the side of the room. She fiddles absentmindedly with the table cards, tracing the calligraphy. She wishes she had grabbed another drink, but she'll be alright for now.

Alex finds his way over a few minutes later, sits down next to her and silently hands her another gin and tonic, a full glass of something dark in his other hand. “You know what this reminds me of?”

Eliza doesn’t say anything, just takes a sip of her drink and waits.

“That fundraiser. The epilepsy thing.”

The epilepsy thing, the fundraiser for New York City’s mayor’s pet project, the one that all the Schuyler girls used to attend each year with their parents. Eliza forgets how exactly Alex scored himself an invite — he certainly didn’t pay the $1,000 a plate asking price, or throw in $50,000 to sponsor a table like Senator Schuyler did each year. But it was a good room to be in for a newly minted lawyer with an eye on City Hall, and however exactly he pulled it off, Alex ended up inside, practically shoving another, better dressed young guy out of the way so he could introduce himself to Angelica.

He’s right, of course. As beautiful and well planned as the party is, at a certain point all high end events tend to look the same. The crowd is significantly older (and so are they) tonight, but the atmosphere is the same. Eliza even feels similar, sitting here on the sidelines, watching Angelica flit from one important conversation to the next.

“The night I met you,” he continues.

“The night you met Angelica,” Eliza counters.

“Both of you,” he says easily, shrugs.

She knows that that’s an awful, horrible, absolutely wrong thing for him to say, but she’s drunk and she knows that deep down he knows that, too. That’s not something he’s supposed to say aloud. He’s not supposed to acknowledge the flicker of possibility they both felt when they met, just a few minutes after he and Angelica did, the way Eliza’s interest must have been obvious, even if Angelica never indicated she noticed.

Even if she did, Angelica never would have thought that Eliza’s interest — or Alex’s, in her — was serious. He was so obviously destined to be Angelica’s, the two of them a perfect match. It would be odd if he had ended up with Eliza; sweet, kind, trusting Eliza, the one who didn't care about politics and power games and perfection, the one who just wanted life to be easy and happy and simple. It's true, at least to an extent. Eliza's never had any illusions that she could be the same type of person as Angelica. But she thinks she could have been different, maybe, or at least tried to be, if she had been the one Alex picked.

“You met her first,” she reminds him, those few minutes that made all the difference. It was Eliza’s turn to get drinks, and those few minutes she spent making small talk with the bartender were all it took for Alex and Angelica to solidify into Alex-and-Angelica and sentence Eliza to a lifetime on the sidelines.

“Yeah, but that wasn’t — I still could have — you were there, too,” he says. “There was both of you.”

Eliza takes another drink. “But you married her. We were both there, and you married her.”

“It didn’t have to be that way. It wasn’t because I had to, or because I didn’t —” He stops, and looks at her, begging her to understand. “I loved her. I do love her.”

“I know.” And she does. He loves Angelica, and Angelica loves him, and she knows that they should be together. Angelica’s happy with him, which is all Eliza has ever wanted for her. Angelica's always given so much, and so selflessly — _thank god for Angelica!_ — that she deserves someone that cares as much as she does. That's what she got with Alex, and Eliza would never, ever begrudge her that.

But — there were moments, between there and here, where it could have been different. He could have lingered with Eliza that first night, instead of following Angelica to the bar, and the dance floor, and almost-but-not-quite into a cab at the end of the night. He could have said something, at any point between the benefit and the drink he and Angelica got a couple days later, asking about her little sister, and if she was single. He could have broken it off before it got serious, or before they got engaged, before they got married, if he thought that he might rather be with Eliza.

He didn’t do any of those things, but he didn’t stop looking at her like they were still possible.

“But you, Eliza, I —”

She shakes her head, cuts him off. She can’t hear the end of that sentence. “I know,” she says softly.

“What would you have said?” he asks, too lightly for such a question.

Eliza taps her fingers against her sweating glass, looks out at the room; at her husband, her parents, both her sisters, everyone she’s known her entire life. What would she have said, like he doesn’t know the answer.

She doesn’t have to say anything, not if she doesn’t want to. She could tell him to fuck off, or she could fuck him in one of the closed off rooms down the hall. No one would notice them disappearing for ten minutes — even if they did, she’s had months to come up with potential excuses. She could ignore him, let this be another of a decade’s worth of too-close, too-heavy moments between them.

She could lie, and say that she doesn’t understand the question, or that it doesn’t matter, because he married Angelica. She could say that her dreams of that possibility died the day she married Church. Eliza could lie, and Alexander would know that she was. But she still could.

She looks back at Alex. “I would have said yes,” she says. “But you didn’t ask.”

He drops his eyes to his lap. “No,” he says quietly, mostly to himself. “I didn’t.”

Across the room, Church has finally freed himself and is scanning the room for her, two champagne flutes in hand. He finds her eventually, gestures at the table next to him.

Eliza stands, slowly, as not to step on the hem of her dress. “Goodnight, Alex,” she says, looking at her husband across the room. She leaves her drink half-empty on the table.

Church has found another free table and a corner piece of cake by the time she makes her way over. “Hello, beautiful,” he says, smiling up at her, tie just barely loosened.

She grins back, sits sideways across his lap with an arm slung around his shoulders. “Hi. You’re very popular tonight.”

“I’m all yours now,” he promises, and kisses her. “I brought cake.”

“You did!” She hands him a fork and takes a bite with her own, swinging her foot slightly.

He hums appreciatively, takes a sip of champagne. “Someday we’ll have our own party like this.”

Eliza steals his glass instead of reaching for her own. “Only thirty one years to go,” she says. “Do we have to invite this many people?”

“Not if you don’t want to.”

“What if I don’t want to invite my cousins?”

“Be nice.”

“No,” she says, only managing to keep a straight face for a few seconds before dissolving into giggles and kissing him again. “It’ll be nice, ours. We can make the kids give speeches about what a good job we did raising them.”

“Absolutely,” he agrees. “We should warn them now, so they can start collecting anecdotes.”

Eliza nods, steals some more of his champagne. “I guess we can invite everyone if you want. We have to make up for not having a real wedding.”

“I don't know, love, this feels pretty real to me,” he says, tapping her ring and taking his glass back. “I have the documentation to prove it.”

“The marriage part we've got down,” she concedes, shifting so she can lean back against his chest. “The Vegas wedding we could probably improve on.”

“You think?”

Eliza's never regretted marrying Church, not for one second, but she sometimes does regret the circumstances. They had been seeing each other for a few months when Alex and Angelica got married, but she didn’t bring him to the wedding. He was out of town on business, and Eliza didn’t want him there, anyway. She didn’t trust herself, and she didn’t think it fair to make him be the maid of honor’s date when she was still so bitterly, seethingly jealous. She did okay at the wedding, smiled and hugged Angelica and argued with the DJ when he wouldn’t turn down the music. When it was over, she went up to her hotel room and let herself cry and be jealous and awful and horrible for a few minutes, and then she washed her face and decided that was done. The next morning she kissed Angelica and Alex goodbye when they left for their honeymoon, then she called Church from the cab home, even though it was already night wherever he was, and gave him the play by play.

With the Schuyler-Hamiltons gone, if only for a couple weeks, Eliza felt like she could relax. She stopped worrying if she looked suitably thrilled for her sister or if she seemed too attentive to whatever Alex was talking about. She stopped worrying, period — Church had that effect on her. They went to dinner and drinks and across the world on his insane private plane, and she never once worried if he liked her or not, because she knew that he did. When she told him she loved him, over breakfast one Sunday morning in her apartment, it felt like the easiest thing she’d ever done.

She brought him to family dinner a month or so later, and though she swore she didn’t care anymore, she couldn’t help but thrill at how awfully Alex hid his jealousy. Church was as delightful as always, charmed her entire family with ease, and Alex was snide and rude and drank too much. When Eliza and her sisters talked about it later, they chalked it up to lingering class anxiety and decided he’d come around eventually. It didn’t matter, not really. Though even Peggy and Angelica had expressed concern when they heard about the slightly older, probable billionare, of their circle but MIA for the past five or so years guy Eliza was seeing, within five minutes of meeting him Eliza could practically see Mommy planning another wedding in the back of her mind. Alex and Angelica got married in the city, so she’d want to do Eliza’s upstate; they could do it in the spring, the reception outside, maybe at the Hall of Springs. Church already knew everyone they did, so there’d be no awkward shuffling of seats as to not highlight the groom’s complete lack of family, and a van Rensselaer groomsman would fit right in.

It was a nightmare. The last thing Eliza wanted was a wedding attempting to measure up to Angelica’s. She hated it already, and Church hadn’t even asked, not really. They’d talked about it, and it was clearly a possibility, maybe even a probability. But they hadn’t even been together a year, and Eliza wasn’t exactly itching to follow in this particular set of Angelica’s footsteps. She still said yes, when he proposed a couple weeks later, quiet and serious and lovely, with the biggest ring she had ever seen in her life. It was gorgeous, and perfect, and she loved him, and she’d never been so happy.

But there was the matter of the wedding, and for once, _for once_ , she didn’t want to do things by committee. She didn’t want to hear her aunt’s opinion on the venue, or hear Peggy bitching about her dress, or do her best not to fight with her mother on the day of. She didn’t want to share this or Church with her entire family, she just wanted to have this one thing to herself, to themselves, and that’s what she told him. He was very quiet for a moment, and she panicked, afraid that he’d be offended that she didn’t want the ceremony of it all, that he’d think she was somehow embarrassed.

“Eliza, love, we can go to City Hall tomorrow if you like,” he said seriously. “I just want to be married to you.”

Her anxiety evaporated instantly; she laughed and said, “what, you aren’t dying to have a boring reception at the Casino?” and then she stopped and thought for a second. Church said _what_ and she said “I have an idea” and the next hour they were on a plane to Vegas and six hours later they were married. Her family was shocked, the neighbors scandalized, and Eliza was ecstatic. Church bought a gorgeous townhouse on the Upper East Side to be decorated and renovated while they took a month long honeymoon, and Eliza delighted in updating her last name across social media platforms and introducing him to people as her husband. They were happy, they were so _happy_ , and Eliza never for a second regretted her choice.

“Not really, no,” she says. “Do you?”

“Not in the slightest,” he answers. “The result’s the important bit, and I think we're sorted there.”

“I think we are, too.”

\---------

Eliza drums her fingers on the table, glances at the clock. 10:03AM.

It's become a routine, Alex coming over on Tuesday mornings. She used to kind of like having the house quiet for a few hours, Church at work, Ricky asleep or happy to follow her around while she folded laundry or read a book.

But the baby's asleep, and Eliza woke up feeling antsy and impatient, could barely focus on getting the kids to school. She had planned to go to yoga, but she didn't trust herself to relax, so she ended up back at home, wandering from floor to floor, searching for something to do.

She looks at the clock again — 10:06AM. She's too proud to text him, and she'd feel dumb, anyway. He has a job, and a life, and she shouldn't be counting the minutes until he comes over.

It's another couple minutes before she hears the key in the door — the one he and Angelica have for emergencies. She catches sight of the clock as he comes down the hall. 10:09AM. They have a little over an hour until he should be heading back to work.

She's out of her chair and kissing him before he can even say hello, hot and messy and needy, and he's right there, pushing her up and onto the table. She tries to hold him there, hand on the back of his neck, but he slips out of her grasp, dropping to his knees and yanking her hips to the edge of the table. They don't really ever _do_ this, they don't ever have enough time, they don't _really_ have the time now, but she doesn't care, she's shifting so he can pull her leggings off, watching him kiss up her leg with a twisting want in her stomach. She lets her eyes slip shut, tilts her head back while his mouth moves over her, achingly good, sending sparks up her spine.

“Alex,” she gasps, louder than she intended. The seconds slow and shift, time dragging slower and slower, making her painfully aware of every moment, the exact length of her ragged exhale when he leans into her, speeds up the motion of his hand. It's too good, honestly, even the gentle-firm pressure of his other hand tight on her thigh. She wraps her hands around the corners of the table, the edges digging into her palm sharpening the feeling into something she can stand, keeping her from getting lost in it.

“That good?” he mumbles against her, so smug she can practically taste it.

She can’t really find it in herself to snark at him, not right now, especially when another desperate “fuck,” slips out unbidden. He pushes her onto her back, hand firm on her stomach, shifts the angle, and she digs her nails into her palms so she doesn’t scream. “Alex,” she says, “come on, please, god,” some kind of rambling nonsense she can’t get a hold of, the way he gets when he’s close, rough and pushy and desperate.

“What do you want, Eliza?” he says, voice pitched low, just barely vibrating against her. “Tell me, baby, I’ll do it, whatever you want, whatever he can’t give you, whatever he won’t —”

It takes her a second to react, foggy through the haze of feeling. When she realizes what exactly the fuck he’s saying, she sits up abruptly, shoving him away with both hands. “What the fuck did you just say?”

She watches him decide to lie; he clearly knows what he said, but he keeps his tone casual, reaches for her again. “Nothing, Eliza, I was just —”

“ _Don’t_ touch me,” she hisses, getting up and backing out of his reach, yanking her leggings up, straightening her shirt. “I swear to god, Alex, what the fuck is wrong with you?”

“Really, Eliza? This is what you choose to take issue with? Not the fact that we’re having an affair, but the fact that I said something about it?”

“Yes,” she says shakily. “You can’t say things like that. It’s not true.”

“Sorry, I’ll be more polite next time you invite me over to fuck you while your husband’s at work,” he says, biting and sarcastic. “Wouldn’t want to imply that you’re anything less than perfectly happily married.”

“I _am_ ,” she snaps. “I love him and I’m happy and don’t ever say anything like that ever again or I swear I’ll never speak to you again.”

“If you’re so fucking happy, why am I even here?”

“Shut up.”

“No! I want to know.” His cheeks are flushed red, hair messed up from her hands, and she’s almost never seen him so angry, not with her. “If your perfect, rich, important husband is everything you ever dreamed of, then why are you still fucking around with me?”

“Don’t talk about Church,” she warns him, feeling murderous. “Don’t ever talk about him, you don’t know anything.”

“Enlighten me, then.”

“Fuck you.”

“I’m just saying. There’s a reason.”

“So why are _you_ here? What’s so supposedly awful about your marriage?”

“Don’t,” he says furiously. “Do not.”

“Tell me. What’s so horrible about being married to my sister?” she asks, taunting, hearing herself speak with a faint sense of horror at her own cruel words.

“Shut the fuck up, Eliza.”

“Don’t talk to me like that.”

“Jesus, are you — are you _fucking_ kidding me? Are you serious?”

“No! Why can you ask me that and I can’t ask you?” she demands. “Why do you keep coming over here?”

“You’re the one who —”

“What?

“I would stop! I wouldn’t have done any of this if you didn’t want to!”

“This isn’t — you’re — this —” she sputters. “You’re not doing me a _favor_ , Alex. You keep doing this, you keep acting like you somehow have these high, holier than thou motivations, some obligation to keep sleeping with me, instead of just acknowledging it for what it is.”

“Then what is it? What are we doing? Because you’ve made it clear that you love him, and that he’s keeping you perfectly satisfied,” he spits. “So what the fuck am I doing here? There’s a reason and I want to know.”

“Why is it me that has to answer that?” She crosses her arms over her chest, hopes he can't hear how high her voice has gotten, that he can't see how much this conversation is freaking her out. “You’re here, too! You’re married, too!”

“It’s not the same thing, and you know that,” he says, and it's working, she's getting under his skin, but it's not enough.

“What, your marriage is somehow more sacred than mine? You’re cheating too, asshole,” she says viciously. He needs to go, he won't _leave_ , he won't drop it, and Eliza doesn't see a way out. She can't have this conversation. She can't say the things he wants to hear if she's going to keep living her life.

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Well what did you mean? You’re the supposed genius around here.”

“You met him after me,” he says, like it’s obvious. Like she knows what that means.

“So?”

“Eliza, you said — you _said_ , you _know_ — I got to choose. And you didn’t.”

“So _what_ ,” she says incredulously. “There’s no way I could be happy with anyone but you?”

“No, but —” he pauses, jaw working. “You already knew. When you and I met, I was already with Angelica, and you knew that. I thought you were just flirting with me to pass the time, or whatever. Or that you just wanted what your older sister had. Something like that.”

“Fuck you,” she says, quietly. She doesn’t contradict him.

“Well.” He shrugs. “It was — I was with her, but there was always you, too. To me. But I would have stopped, if you had. If you were happy with him, I would have ignored it and that would have been it. But you didn’t.”

“You didn’t, either.”

“I would have then, and I would have now. I tried to, I wanted to tell them, I wanted to apologize, and you just —”

“This isn’t my fault,” she insists, panic making her desperate. “It was you. You were always there, you always came to me, you always acted like you wanted me.”

“I did. You’ve always known how I felt,” he says evenly, a weird calm settling over him, but she hears the accusation anyway. “I’ve never hidden that, not from you.”

“Okay? So?”

“So you don’t get to bullshit me. You don’t get to act like it’s so fucking insane that I know that you feel the same way about me, and that it’s not the same as whatever Church is to you.”

Eliza takes this in, frozen in place. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says finally.

“Are you kidding me? Seriously?”

“I'm not kidding you, Alexander,” she says coldly. “I don't know what you're trying to say.”

“Unbelievable. You're the one who kept insisting that it was both of us. That we’re both at fault for whatever this is.”

“I did, but that doesn't mean —”

“Doesn't mean _what_?”

She flounders for a second. Eliza doesn't know how to do _this_ , the fighting; she and Church don't really, and even in her worst fights with Angelica, it never felt like this, like there's nowhere to hide, like there's nothing she can do to keep from saying things she's afraid to. “It's not the same thing,” she protests. “Just because we did that doesn't mean —”

“So you're saying,” he interrupts, “you'll happily admit to sleeping with me, but not being in —”

“Shut up!” She can't breathe, panic rising in her chest, nails pressing so hard into her palms she's sure they've drawn blood. “Shut up, Alex, don't say that.”

He does, and she feels like she won, just for that second. “I really don't get you,” he says, quietly, almost resigned. “I don't know what you want.”

“I want you to go,” she says, louder. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

“Really? That's all you have to say? Jesus Christ,” he hisses, runs a hand through his hair. “You’re serious? You’re in that deep denial?”

“Get out.”

He glares at her one last time, turns to go, like she wanted him to. “You can’t pretend this isn’t happening, you know,” he says from her doorway. “I don’t care how sure you are that no one’s going to find out, this is still a thing that you’re doing.”

“Fuck off, Alex. I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”

“Don’t fucking worry, Eliza, I don’t want to talk to you anymore either,” he snaps, and slams the door behind him.

\---------

That Sunday Eliza stays home from the Sunday family brunch with Anne, who had a slight cough. “Are you sure, sweetheart?” Church asks, feeling Anne’s admittedly cool forehead. “She’s probably attended Sunday brunch with worse.”

Church is right, of course, but Eliza shakes her head. “We’re still weeks away from spring break, and Easter’s right around the corner, and I don’t want her to get sick and for the rest of us to catch it. I’m—” she sighs, and Church looks at her sympathetically.

“You’ve not been sleeping well,” he says. “That’s sorted, then. The girls will stay here, and the boys will brunch with the Schuyler clan.”

“Daddy,” Anne says, clutching at his hand, “Daddy, will you bring me back a waffle?” She sounds as though her very life depends on it.

“I think,” he says, taking her seriously, as he always does with children, “that Mummy will feed you wonderfully, and you won’t even miss our boring old waffles, but I’ll call before we leave and double check. Will that suffice?”

“It will,” Anne says, nodding, and Eliza feels a twinge of guilt for keeping Anne home on a trumped up reason.

To make up for it, she has their favorite breakfast place deliver a big enough spread for their entire family, and Anne is more than satisfied. She reads with Anne, and plays with her, and puts her phone away after texting her mother why they weren’t coming.

Alex doesn’t come on Tuesday, and Eliza refuses to dwell on it. While Ricky naps she scours the kitchen sink, and then goes and does the same to the bathroom sinks and tubs, which were all already immaculate, due to the housekeeper that comes twice a week. She had entertained herself on Tuesday mornings before January, and she could again.

Easter is the last weekend in March, and it’s easy to get swept up in the preparations for the holiday. All of the baskets for her children had to be prepared and brought to her parents’ house so that the kids can receive them from the Easter Bunny after the egg hunt they’ll do after the Easter service. The boys and Church all have matching oxfords in pale blue, and she and Anne have dresses in the same color. She orders flowers to have sent to her sisters and parents, and a fruit arrangement to be there for Sunday brunch, calls the jeweler to have her pearls restrung and the cleaners to make sure Church’s suit will be delivered before the weekend.

With Eliza’s prompting, they arrive at Trinity before the rest of the Schuylers, and they sit in their normal pew, with her children craning their necks every few minutes to look for their cousins. Her parents arrive next, and Eliza sighs with relief. Her parents are on the other side of Johnny, the rest of her family on the other side. Even if the Schuyler-Hamiltons come next, she’ll be too many people down from Alex for anyone to expect them to interact beyond a wave.

Peggy arrives next, blowing kisses to their parents and giving real ones to the Schuyler-Church children. They spend the next ten minutes telling hopeful families that, no, they were waiting on five more, actually, until the Schuyler-Hamiltons arrive, Alex sitting at the very end.

When they get to the Schuyler house there is the normal bustle of everyone kissing and hugging one another. Eliza has it down to a science with Alex— she glances her cheek against his, her arm around his shoulder, a space wide enough for a child to pass through between their torsos. And it works this morning too, and she’s sure the pressure he applies against her cheek is an accident. “Happy Easter,” they say in unison, and then split apart to chase after their children.

They have a better brunch than usual, her father standing to carve the first slice of the Easter ham before handing it back to a maid to be carved properly in the kitchen, and Eliza’s grateful it’s Easter and not Thanksgiving or Christmas. There’s no need for sappy speeches or for anyone to say anything, beyond the kids reciting some prayer they learned in Sunday School. Johnny insists he doesn’t need Mommy’s help cutting up his meat, but she goes over to Anne’s plate to cut hers, and finds herself shoulder to shoulder with Alex.

“You’re really going to eat all of this? That’s crazy,” he’s saying to little Alex, who laughs and nods. “All of this? Wow. That’ll be impressive.”

“I’m big,” he tells his father seriously, and Alex nods and moves on to Rachel’s plate, right next to Anne’s.

“I’m big, too,” Rachel feels compelled to say, and Anne pipes up that she is as well.

“We know you’re big girls,” Eliza says before Alex can say anything more, “That’s why you can sit here with the big boys.”

Alex glances at her as she finishes serving Anne green beans, handing Rachel her fork back. He looks tired, which isn’t unusual. He also is looking at her like he wants to talk to her, which she cuts off by kissing the top of Anne’s head before going back to her seat next to Church.

Peggy is in charge of the Easter Egg Hunt, so she’s the one who lays down the ground rules for the kids as they chomp at the bit, desperate to collect their eggs. Inside the house the table is being cleared and the Easter baskets are being brought down to the living room for when the kids come inside. Daddy has his good camera out, ready to snap photos of his grandchildren finding plastic eggs, and Church has his phone at the ready. When Peggy yells, “Go!” the kids are off like a shot. Eliza is behind them holding Ricky’s hand, walking carefully so her heels don’t sink into the grass.

“Ricky, look,” she says, pointing at a purple egg next to a planter. The big kids were under strict instructions not to take any of the eggs in plain sight in order to get some semblance of fairness. “Get it!”

Looking thoroughly unimpressed, her son picks up the purple egg and puts it in the basket she holds out to him.

“There are more, sweetie, go look,” she tries again, but Ricky’s reaching up for her, not having it.

“You gotta amp it up more,” Alexander suggests from behind her, “It’s just plastic, what does he care? You gotta make him want it.”

“Really? This is your advice?”

“Uh, yeah. Watch.”

Eliza can’t help but watch as Alex insufferably takes Ricky’s hand and builds up the next egg, talking about the mystery of its contents and location, and by the time they encounter one in a flower bed, Ricky is bouncing excitedly. “Mama, look!” he shouts, and she smiles at him.

“That’s so good! Come put in the basket.”

And even as he does it, Alex is cheering him on, much to Ricky’s delight. “Excellent work, little man! Low five for your effort.” Ricky enthusiastically hits Alex’s hand. “Are you ready for more? There’s a whole yard of eggs out there, just waiting for you.”

“More!”

“Let’s do it!”

Eliza follows them, unsettled and flustered. Three eggs later, Alex tells Ricky that he’s got this and goes off to find his own children, but not before looking at Eliza again. She hates him, and she wants him, and she hates that even more.

\---------

On Tuesday morning she texts him after forty minutes of agony. He’s too smart to not delete the message once it’s received, so at 10:43 she sends _Come over, please._

It's the ‘please’ that gets her. Does it sound desperate? Pathetic? Will that one word make Alex feel that he's right in what he's thought and said about her marriage? ‘Come over’ alone sounds too commanding; ‘please come over’ isn't much better. But she’s never once reached out to him like this, and maybe it's her turn.

He doesn’t answer her thirty minutes, long enough for her to get anxious, and then angry, and then determinedly _not_ angry. She’s on her iPad looking for an intricate baking recipe on her cousin’s lifestyle blog to distract her when Alex texts, _Outside_.

She’ll never tell him that she ran to the door, but he sees her throw the door open, standing there looking as raw as she feels. When he comes inside, she shuts the door behind him and wraps her arms around him as tight as she can. She wonders if she should apologize, or if she should expect an apology from him, more than the way he squeezes her in return. They should talk, at the very least, Eliza thinks as she tips her head back so she can kiss Alex, but that’s as far as she gets.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “What do you want? Honestly?”
> 
> “You.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> find us on tumblr: [emily](http://iaintinapatientphase.tumblr.com/) & [madeline](http://derevko.tumblr.com/)

“Can I tell you something?” she asks him. Eliza doesn’t know when it became so familiar to be lying in bed with Alexander, but it did. She missed it the past couple weeks, and it's been… nice to settle back into their routine.

“Of course,” Alex says easily.

“I've been thinking, lately.” She stops, bites her lip.

“What about?”

It's too late to drop it now, which was the point of telling _him_ in the first place. He's not one to let things go. “Sorry,” she says. “It's stupid, it's not even a big deal, I just haven't actually said it yet, and I'm all… whatever, for some reason. It really doesn't even matter.”

His arm tightens around her, thumb rubbing soothingly over her arm. “Of course it matters. Tell me.”

“I think…” she twists the end of the sheet around in her hands, pulls on a stray string, doesn't look at him. “I kind of want to go back to work, when Ricky gets a little older. Not right away, obviously, and only part time. Not until he's in school. Nothing that intense. But maybe —”

“You should,” he says simply, and she feels like she can breathe again.

“You think? You don't think that it would be… bad? It's not like I have to, and it's good for children to have a parent around. It feels kind of selfish. Not that parents that work are,” she quickly clarifies. “That's not what I'm saying. But I just feel like, for me… I don't know what I'm trying to say.”

“I don't think that's selfish,” he says. “I don't think you could be if you tried.”

“I just…” She shrugs. “I don't know why it matters so much to me. It's not like I was very important or especially good at my job, and we don't need the money. It feels dumb to want it so much.”

“You'd be great at anything you wanted to do.”

“You're sweet.”

“I mean it, Eliza, I really do.”

She kisses the spot just above his heart. “Well. Anyway. I don't want to be one of those ladies who lunch, fake philanthropist, stay at home mom trophy wives.”

She can feel him tense instantly. “You don't have to be. Is — do you feel like you have to be?”

“No,” she assures him, “nothing like that. Not at all. I'm just kind of sick of feeling useless. Everyone else has jobs and lives and things to do, and then there's me.”

“No one thinks that,” he says urgently. “No one. I don't.”

“I know that,” she lies. “I'm just being dramatic. It's fine. But basically I kind of want to do something that matters with all my time. I don't know.”

“I think it's really admirable that you feel that way,” Alex says, and even if she can't see his face, she can feel the sincerity in every word. “What would you wanna do?”

“I don't know,” she says honestly, shifts so she can look up at the ceiling. “I liked working at the Center before we had Johnny.”

“What did you like about it?”

“I liked…” She has to think. No one’s ever asked her that before. “I liked that it felt real, if that makes sense. Like a lot of it was spreadsheets and bullshit, but the kids were right there. When we got more money to upgrade the bedrooms or get new stuff for the library, I got to see it become real. It was… I don't know. I felt —”

“Useful.”

“Yeah,” she exhales. “I feel kind of guilty about it, though. I don't wanna just use these kids to congratulate myself for being such a good person, you know? Especially because we have so much money, and my life hasn't been hard, not at all. But I also feel like I could maybe use that? Like all of our friends have so much money that they're not doing anything worthwhile with, and I could get them to give it to people that need it.”

“That’s good, Eliza, that’s really good,” he says, a trace of excitement in his voice that makes her feel a bit giddy, too. “You could do that anywhere. Pick a cause, pick a place, I’m sure they’d all love to have you.”

“Shut up.”

“I mean it!”

“Do you?” She sits up and leans over him, studying his face for any sign of him lying or placating her.

“Yes, Eliza, of course,” he promises.

“Okay…” she says skeptically.

“I really do,” he tells her, grabs her chin gently and pulls her giggling in for a kiss. “I swear.”

“I believe you,” she says, and she does. This is why she wanted to talk to Alex about this. He doesn't lie, not to her, and if anyone she knows could understand the need to _do something_ , it's him. She kisses him again, his hands slightly cool on the bare skin of her back, and flops back down next to him.

“There's a lot of things you could do,” he muses. “I know you did fundraising before, and you'd be good at that, naturally, but give it a few years and you could be running the place. Or starting your own.”

“Let's not get ahead of ourselves.”

“I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility,” he insists. “You're smart and you work hard and people listen to you.”

“My kids would beg to differ.”

“ _I_ listen to you.”

“You do,” she agrees, reaches up and pats his arm, slung gently around her neck. “I have that going for me, at least.”

“I'm serious, though. You could even go back to school if you wanted. Get a masters in nonprofit management, or even something more general like psych if that's what you wanted.”

“I don't know. I don't even know for sure that I want to do this, I can't think that far ahead,” she says, anxiety back in full force.

“No, no no no, Eliza, that's not what I was saying,” he says urgently, rolls onto his side so he can look her fully in the eye. “You don’t have to do everything now, but you could. You shouldn’t limit yourself.”

“We’ll see,” she allows. She doesn’t want to make any of these decisions today — if she did, she would have just brought it up with Church and he would have said something lovely and supportive and that would have been that. Church does that, he makes everything easy, like she could run out tomorrow and get a job if she wanted; and if she didn’t, just as well. He gets her that way, keeps her from obsessing over nothing.

But Alex — she’s not sure. Eliza wanted a push, and someone that would understand why it mattered so much to her. She knew Alex would get it. It’s a strange sort of thrilling, to have him talk to her like she’s someone who can just get a masters or run an organization, someone who can do whatever she wants. Someone like him, or Angelica, someone Eliza’s spent her whole life knowing she isn’t.

It’s certainly… something. She’s not sure she wants that, even if it is possible, but it is an interesting kind of feeling.

Alex is still looking at her with those starry eyes. She kisses him so she doesn’t have to say anything else.

\---------

“Hey, astronaut, I have a question.”

“I'm too short to go to space for real and you know that, Elizabeth,” Peggy says, faux-irritated. “What's your question?”

“Say we were to discover a new planet.”

“We have.”

Eliza waves her off. “A real one, one that we put in the little acronym. My very educated mother.”

“I should present on this. The Eliza Schuyler-Church theory of planetary classification: how well it fits into a nursery rhyme.”

“You can do that if I get a cut.”

“Yeah, Peg,” Angelica chimes in. “When are you gonna start making Bill Nye money?”

“Bill Nye is a hack that stole my parking spot, you know this. There's no money in _real_ academia.”

“God, Angelica, don't lump her in with these fraudulent space geniuses, she's a _real_ one,” Eliza says.

“You are both so awful, you know that?” Peggy says, without any bite. “Anyway, Eliza. What is your very serious question?”

“If we find a new planet, will that fuck up the zodiac?”

Peggy drains her wine glass. “I changed my mind. Bill Nye is a very serious scientist that would be happy to answer your questions. I'll give you his email address.”

“You should really look into this,” Angelica tells her. “What if you're really a Virgo?”

“I am not! The cusp is a myth!”

“It might not be!” Eliza says. “Maybe Pluto getting kicked out messed things up.”

“Pluto didn’t get kicked out, oh my _god_ ,” Peggy complains, cut off by a crash from the kitchen.

“Everything okay?” Angelica calls, already halfway out of her seat.

“Fine!” Alex replies, not quite drowning out Alexander Jr. yelling “Daddy dropped something!”

“Alex, do you—”

“No, I got it!” he yells back, interrupting her. Angelica rolls her eyes and gives up.

“Someone’s in rare form today,” Peggy comments, not bothering to whisper, but she does glance over her shoulder to see if he's within earshot.

“Don’t remind me,” Angelica says. “He’s been in a mood all week.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Work, mostly, but isn’t it always?”

Peggy nods her agreement, Eliza following along. “But seriously,” she continues. “I think even Church noticed, and he’s like, the most conflict averse guy on the planet.”

“Did something happen?” Eliza asks, looking for her husband — last time she saw him, Johnny was trying to charm his way to early dessert.

“No, babe, nothing like that. I was asking him about his trip next week and Alex got all pissy and went off on his phone somewhere.”

Angelica tilts her head, thinking. “Was it about —”

“Money stuff, yeah, I think so,” Peggy answers. “He didn't even really say anything, I just asked where he was going and he mentioned some meeting with some guy who's name I can't remember and Alex freaked like he always does.”

“What a nightmare,” Angelica sighs. “I’ll talk to him.”

“Don’t worry about it, Gel, you know Church doesn’t care,” Eliza says. Well, he doesn’t, but Eliza certainly does. “Alex has just been busy lately, right? I doubt it means anything.”

“I know, but it’s about time he snapped out of it anyway,” she says, standing up. “There’s no use in him brooding over it any longer, he’ll just make himself and all of us miserable.”

Peggy kicks her feet up on to Angelica’s vacated seat as they watch her go. “Yikes,” she says. “It would suck to be married to him, don’t you think? I mean, I love Alex, you know I do, but god.”

“I don’t know, they seem pretty happy most of the time. Not that she’d say anything if they weren’t, of course,” Eliza says. “She wouldn’t want us to know.”

“Stupid, stubborn, superior idiots,” she agrees. “No wonder they get along so well.”

“No wonder,” she echoes.

Peggy’s right, obviously. Alex and Angelica are a remarkably well-matched couple — everyone’s always said so. Even Eliza’s thought that, many times, even if she’s been jealous or wanted to find something, _anything,_ that she could do that her big sister couldn’t. Despite everything else, they get each other in a way Eliza doesn’t think anyone ever really could. Eliza has always known, of course, how brilliant Angelica is. She knows this with a certainty and a pride and the fierce admiration of a little sister, but until she watched her talk to her husband she never understood. Alexander understands what it means to have a mind like Angelica’s, he gets what exactly that means. Eliza knows them both well, she loves them, she can see the visible relief they must feel when they find themselves on the same page, but she doesn't really know. Eliza's never felt that before, but she's never needed it, not like that.

That same relief is there, in both of their faces, when they split up a few minutes later. Alex ends up on the floor helping Rachel with her puzzle, and behaves much better for the rest of the afternoon, no outbursts or sulking or anything else. Angelica comes back to her sisters with a fond roll of her eyes and nothing else.

“Everything’s alright with Angelica and Alexander, right?” Church asks on the way home.

“I think so,” Eliza answers, studiously ignoring the twist of something she doesn’t want to name in her stomach. “Why?”

“He seems to be acting —” he pauses, searching for the words. It’s against his nature to speak badly of anyone, in any way, and Eliza loves him. “Acting a bit strange, lately, have you noticed?”

“Isn’t he always?” she says flippantly.

Church looks away from the road for just a half second to give her a rueful smile. “I _am_ serious, darling. You’re sure nothing’s wrong?”

She has to take a minute and think about what she might have said before. Eliza definitely would have noticed. She always noticed the slightest change about him: how tired he looked, how often he was checking his phone, how much he was drinking — she can’t remember a time where she wasn’t watching him in the corner of her eye.

“I’m not sure,” she answers. “Angelica hasn’t said anything. It’s probably just work?”

He nods thoughtfully. “Maybe I’ll go see him for lunch this week, see if there’s anything he’d like to talk about.”

“That’s very kind of you,” she says fondly, reaches over to squeeze his arm lightly. “I wouldn’t get your hopes up too high, though. You know how he can be about these things.”

“Hmm.” He’s silent, concentrating on turning carefully through this quiet intersection. “That’s true. Maybe you should take a crack at it. You two have always been close.”

Eliza forces herself to laugh. “I don’t know if that’s the word for it. I think he just got in the habit of telling me things after he got drunk at their engagement party and I took him upstairs so Mom and Dad wouldn't see. They still weren't sold on him, and Angelica was scared that he’d say something stupider than usual.”

He nods. “It's good that they've come around. He's a stand-up chap, and has the good sense to be in love with Angelica.”

“He is,” Eliza agrees. “Well, either way. I heard more about his issues with his ex-roommate and the professor he always thought didn't like him than I ever expected to know. He hasn't drunk cried in a while, maybe we're due for another session. It could be me, it could be a cab driver.”

She can see the side of his mouth quirk up in the passing street lights and feels impossibly warm, despite the conversation they’re having. “That’s probably true as well, but you shouldn’t sell yourself short. You have a natural empathy — it’s no wonder someone as troubled as he is often comes to you.”

“Thank you,” she says softly, and means it.

\---------

 _What are you doing?_ Alex texts her on Thursday morning.

 _I’m at Bergdorf. I won’t be home for a while_ , she replies, hoping he’ll read between the lines. Not that she doesn’t want to see him, but she genuinely does need to get some new clothes for the summer. That’s the point of her mother taking Ricky for a few hours on Thursday mornings: so Eliza can get stuff done without a toddler in tow, not so she can have sex with her brother in law, even if that has been what’s been happening for the past few months.

She doesn’t get a response, not that she really expected one. She throws her phone back in her purse and goes back to comparing a few potential comforters for Ricky. He’s almost two now, her baby, and they had planned to get him a real bed this summer. She’s just getting ideas, she reminds herself, she doesn’t have to pull any triggers today. She does actually need to go by Barney’s to get him and the other kids summer stuff as well. He doesn’t fit in any of his clothes from last summer, and all Johnny’s warm weather clothing isn’t fit to pass down, the way he destroys things. Anne, too. She grew a few inches, but she’s too picky. Eliza will have to find an afternoon to take her shopping before they go out to the Hamptons for the summer.

She’s moved on to sheets, trying to remember what colors they had been talking about painting his room, when Alex appears next to her.

“What are you doing here?” she says, surprised. He looks awful, even worse than usual. The omnipresent circles under his eyes have somehow grown six sizes since she saw him two days ago. His shirt is wrinkled, and he’s not wearing a jacket — he must have just walked over here from work, she realizes with faint alarm.

He shrugs, tries for a smile that clearly takes enormous effort. “I was bored.”

“Okay,” Eliza says, suspicious, but something in his face keeps her from pressing it.

“That color is ugly,” he tells her, pointing at the sheet set she had been considering. “That’s a color for white kids named Chad Something-ton the Seventeenth.”

“You have an Alex the Second.”

“Yeah, but my kids don’t have fucking pastel bedrooms. Or sailing themes.”

“I guess that’s true,” she concedes. “They are ugly.”

“Glad to be of use.”

“Continue to be of use, please,” she says, dumps the clothes she hasn’t had the chance to pass to one of the personal shoppers yet into his arms.

“What’s next?”

“I gotta get another pair of those pants I like in another color, and look at wine glasses, but that’s it for today, I think,” she lies. Her list was about seven times longer, but he’s practically climbing out of his skin, and she doesn’t really want him being all Alex at her while she’s trying to do some legitimate shopping. She can always get Mommy to watch Ricky another day next week, she won’t mind.

“Cool. Excellent. Lead the way,” he says, enthusiasm painfully forced.

She looks at him warily, but she knows him well enough not to bother pushing it. He’ll be perfectly fine until he chooses not to be, and she can only hope he chooses to lose it in a semi-restrained fashion. For now, at least, he’s standing too close to her while she looks at new glassware, only half paying attention. They have plenty for everyday use, these would just be to replace the larger set for they have people over, but she can’t settle on any particular design.

Alex rocks back and forth on the balls of his feet. “Those are nice.”

“Yeah,” she says noncommittally.

“Do you not like them?” He cranes his head up, points at another set on the top shelf. “Do you like those?”

“Sure.”

He frowns. “What exactly are you looking for?”

“I’m not sure,” she admits, feeling flustered.

“You just said you needed —”

“It’s fine. I’ll just look another day. I don’t have to pick anything right away.”

“You might as well, if you’re already here.”

“Who cares? I can come back, it doesn’t matter,” she says, irritated. “Come on. I just need to get one other thing.”

Alex follows her dutifully to the sixth floor where she finds the pants she wanted easily and eyeballs a couple summer dresses and a bathing suit for when she can come back without a shadow. She hands off her accumulated purchases to her personal shopper, Madison, who thankfully doesn’t ask who the fuck he is, and where Eliza’s husband is. “I pulled a few dresses for you,” she says, carefully not looking at Alex. “You said navy, for the Fourth, right?”

“Yes! Thank you,” Eliza says. “I don’t really have time to try on today, but —”

“No worries, we have all your sizes,” she says. “Do you want to at least look and see if we’re on the right track?”

“That’s perfect.” She follows Madison to the dressing rooms in back, ignores Alex fidgeting while she wheels out the rack filled with potential summer dresses she has to go through at some point.

“I know you said blue, and simple, but I picked out some other things I hope you’ll like. There’s another YSL in there, which is too formal for the beach, but your dress for your parents’ party was gorgeous and I thought it would be worth a look if you and Mr. Church had something coming up.”

“It all looks lovely, thank you, Madison,” Eliza says, flipping through the dresses. She pulls out one in a bit of a deeper blue than the rest, the waist just a bit slimmer.

“That looks nice,” Alex says behind her.

Eliza bites her lip. He is right, but — whatever.

Madison, perceptive as always, jumps right back in. “That one was my favorite, too. Why don’t I put a few of these with the rest of your purchases and you can try them out? Anything you don’t like we can return and try again.”

“Great,” she says quickly. “Thank you again.”

“Of course, Mrs. Church,” she says. Eliza can see Alex stiffen in the corner of her eye. “We’ll have everything sent over this afternoon.”

She wheels the rack away, leaving Eliza alone with him.

“Do you want to get lunch?” she asks, for lack of anything else.

He shrugs, fingers twitching against his side. “If you do, that’s fine with me. Whatever you want.”

She kind of did, but looking at him, there's no way he'll make it through a meal or even five minutes of sitting down without freaking out. He’s gotten paler and somehow more exhausted looking in the thirty minutes since he arrived. She wants to hold him, or something, help make him stop looking so upset. She also, for the first time, is afraid of getting caught. Eliza trusts herself — _she_ won’t do anything stupid in a public place, but Alex definitely might. She finds a second to be grateful, deranged as it is, that Alexander is her brother in law, and therefore not a strange man to be spotted out with.

“Let's just go back to mine,” she says. “Sound okay?”

He nods frantically. “Yeah. That sounds good. Can I carry something, or?”

“No, it's fine. Come on.”

They get a cab immediately, and Alex stands close to her as the Bergdorf doorman opens the car door. She hands Alex the tip for him, too far on the inside of the taxi, but once the door is closed his hand is on her knee. As she tells the driver her address she puts her hand over his, lacing their fingers together.

They don’t talk in the cab, and she can tell it’s killing him by the way his knee bounces, the way the fingers of his free hand drums on his thigh. Eliza can’t think of a way to soothe him, and it bothers her. She wonders how often Angelica gets to see this— Alex has never once stopped trying to impress his wife, not since the day he met her. They’re both so awe-inspiringly brilliant, and so high-achieving, she knows what it’s like to want to present yourself as nothing less than perfect to them. She also knows it can’t always be like that with them— she’s seen the way they look at one another, and how they talk, and she can’t imagine being with someone so long and not being able to put your guard down.

Alex has come to her with his problems before, and to show off his triumphs for her approval, but it’s never before felt like he was coming to her instead of Angelica. She doesn’t know what to make of that.

He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even really look at her, shoves a handful of bills at the driver when they pull up outside her house; the cracks in his composure starting to fissure. His hand’s on her lower back as she opens the door, almost vibrating with tension, and as soon as she gets inside, he's pressed her against the wall and kissing her like he's drowning. This wasn't why she invited him over, at least not _this_ time, but for a second she's almost content to let him work whatever's bothering him out like this. She has before: ignored the faint wildness in his eyes and said nothing while he got her off like he was trying to win something, kept quiet while he clung to her after. But she can’t, not today.

Eliza pushes him off, gently but firmly. “Hey. Do you want to talk about it?”

“No,” he says, leans in again. She stops him and raises an eyebrow.

“There's nothing to talk about,” he lies.

“Alexander.”

“Fine,” he says, having the audacity to look annoyed. “If you insist.”

“You’re not going to make me fight with you, so if you could stop being such a dick, I’d appreciate it.”

He clearly considers pushing it, jaw set stubbornly, but he drops it. “Sorry.”

“It's fine. Come on,” she says, takes his hand and pulls him down the hall and onto the couch. She sits next to him, knees brushing his thigh, hand still holding his. “Tell me.”

“It's not even a big deal.”

“Well, clearly it is, otherwise you wouldn't be so worked up about it.”

He doesn't respond.

“Alex, you know you can talk to me. You always… we used to. All the time. It shouldn’t be different just because we… just because things are different now.”

“I know that. I know, Eliza, that’s not what — you know it’s not just that,” he says, pleading.

“I do,” she says, reaches out and touches his face gently, runs a thumb under his eye as if to smooth away the exhaustion there. “I know.”

“I really mean that,” he says quietly. “This morning wasn't good. All I wanted was to see you.”

“Did something happen?”

“No,” he says. “That’s the problem.”

“Tell me,” she urges.

“Okay,” he says, exhales heavily. “I feel like I'm going nowhere. There's nowhere left for me to go. I've been working for the Senator for three years, and there's nothing more.”

“Isn't he going to run for —”

“Yes. Next time. But that's still four years away, so it's two years before we can start really doing anything.”

“Okay, but Alex, that's going to be one hell of a promotion. There's gonna be plenty to do. I assume you'll be in charge of the campaign?”

He nods. “Yeah. We've already talked about it.”

“So…” She stops herself and tries to find the words, tries to remember where exactly all his land mines are placed. “So it's just another year or so before things get going again. It's not _you_ , it's just the timing.”

“I know that,” he says, defensive again. “I know.”

There's no way she can ask “so what is it, then?” in a tone that won't make things worse, so Eliza gives him a few minutes to work it out himself.

“I hate that I have to wait,” he says eventually.

“Well, presidential elections are only every four years, and there wasn't an opening this time. You can't help that.”

“Yeah, but — I know. You're right,” he concedes. “It's not just that, though. I hate having tied my future to someone else.”

“Why?”

“It makes me feel stuck. Powerless. There are so many things that I know I could be doing, but instead I'm just waiting around. And there’s still a chance that it’s all for nothing. He could die tomorrow, and then I’m fucked, having put all my eggs in that stupid basket.”

“That’s morbid. Don’t say those kinds of things.”

“Not saying it doesn’t make it not true,” he says, weary. “It’s true, though. Anything could happen at any time, and it’s just… I don’t like having to depend on other people.”

“You’re not dependent on anyone. If you don’t like working for him then you can leave at any time.”

“No, I can’t. Because then that’s years down the drain, and I’ll have to figure something else out, and —” He stops, runs his hands over his face. “I just don’t know how to get to what’s next. I feel stuck.”

Eliza leans her head against the back of the couch and thinks for a second. She really doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t understand this kind of dilemma — it feels like it requires some kind of gene she’s missing, something inherent in the overachieving, Alex and Angelica type DNA. Something that Eliza has never and probably will never have to understand. “I’m sorry you feel that way,” she says softly.

He shrugs, looking lost.

“Are you unhappy?” she asks gently.

“No! No. I have… a lot of good things,” he says, dodging around _Angelica_ and _our kids_ and their shared, unspoken guilt. “I just don’t wanna be some old, pathetic guy that missed his shot because I decided to bet on the wrong person.”

“Okay. Well. You’re hardly old,” she tells him, squeezing his hand so he’ll look at her. “You’re not pathetic, and I know that you know that you’re on your way to being the second most powerful guy in the country, so no feeling sorry for yourself. You have to ‘wait,’ while doing a thousand other things that are moving you forward, for not even two years. You have small children, you know how fast that goes. So. You’re not stuck and that’s that.”

“You’re right. You always are.”

“I know that,” she lies, smiling like it’s a joke. “When was the last time you slept? You look awful.”

“That’s rude,” he says, but with the ghost of a smile.

“Not wrong, though.” She sets an alarm on her phone for an hour and a half later, kicks off her shoes. “Come on. Sleep time.”

“It’s still light outside.”

“And?” She lies down, sighs theatrically. “Perfect time for a nap, Alexander.”

She keeps her eyes shut, but hears him laughing gently above her. “Fine. Scoot over.”

“Sorry, can’t hear you, I’m asleep.”

He laughs again, pushes at her side a bit and they end up sprawled out together, his head on her chest.

“This is nice. You were right about the napping mid-day, too.”

“Mmhm,” she says, smoothing some hair out of his face. “About that, for sure. Go to sleep, you’ll feel better.”

“I will. I do,” he says. Eliza shuts her eyes, and hopes not to dream.

\---------

Even if she technically doesn't have anywhere to be or anything she needs to be doing, it still feels oddly decadent to be in bed in the middle of the day. It's nice, though, sheets warm from the sun, Alex’s arm thrown over her waist. She pushes him off so she can stretch a little, her body pleasantly sore.

“I can come over tomorrow, if you want,” he offers, idly checking something on his phone.

Eliza looks at him quizzically. “It’s Friday tomorrow.”

“Yeah, but Church isn’t here. He’s in Madrid.”

“Munich.”

“Whatever.” He ignores her for a minute, typing something, or pretending to. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’ve been here for about four more hours than I usually am.”

She did notice, and she was hoping he wouldn’t call her on it. Eliza turns over to face him, studies the near-pouting lines of his profile while he pretends he isn’t waiting for her to say something. “You can’t just… you can’t just be here whenever you want.”

“Why not?”

“Because we’re both married, and this isn’t a free for all,” she says, feeling stupid. She doesn’t know why he’s acting like he doesn’t understand.

“I know that, thanks,” he says shortly. “But it’s Tuesdays because he’s at work, and sometimes Thursdays when your mom has Ricky, and tomorrow he won’t be here, so it’s not like it’s unprecedented.”

“I don’t care,” she says stubbornly. “Don’t come over.”

“He won’t even be here!”

“I said I don’t care! You aren’t entitled to my time every second he isn’t around.”

“Fine,” he says, holding up his hands in surrender. “It was just a suggestion, there’s no need to get so worked up about it.”

Eliza could kill him, he’s so awful sometimes. She twists further away from him and sits up, wrapping the duvet around herself. “I don’t know why you’re acting like this.”

“Like what?” he asks coolly, sending a little twinge of anxiety through her. She doesn’t want to argue with him. She’s not Angelica, she doesn’t know how to do that in a way that she could win.

“Jealous.”

He’s silent for a moment. “The word you’re looking for is ‘envious.’”

“Shut the fuck up,” she snaps. “You know what I meant.”

“You could say ‘covetous,’ too,” he says calmly.

“Church isn’t your neighbor.”

“No, just my brother in law.”

Eliza presses her fingers to her temples, steadies herself. “Get out of my house.”

“Is that what you really want?”

She glares at him. “What do _you_ want? Honestly?”

“You.”

“Well,” she says, gestures around the room, the bed, their clothes on the floor.

“That’s not — it’s not that. It’s not _just_ that.”

“There’s nothing else. This is it.”

He looks away from her, scowling at nothing. “That’s not enough.”

Of course it’s not, she wants to scream. In a perfect world, she wouldn’t have to choose, she could have her husband and her family and her life exactly as wonderful as it is, but she’d also have Alex. Not just on weekday mornings and in quiet snatches of time when they’re with their families, but all of him. They’d say the things they don’t, and she’d never wonder what might have been or could still be. She’d never hurt Angelica’s feelings, she’d never lie to Church. But that’s not possible, and it’s his fault. He got to choose, and he didn’t choose her, and now this is what they’re left with.

“It has to be,” she says, not looking at him. “This is all I — this is what there is.”

Before this all started, she would have been absolutely sure that he'd take her word as law — he always used to. He had always looked at her and listened to her like she was better than she was, someone special. It's what drew her to him in the first place, and what kept her coming back these past few months, despite everything else.

He isn't quite so admiring of her, not anymore. That's what she wanted, at least partially: off that pedestal he had her on to keep her at arm's length. And she got it — there's nothing quite like a messy, extended, ugly affair to show someone you can be as horribly human as everyone else. He stopped being careful with her months ago, stopped with the apologies and the confessions and the fake reverence that made her skin crawl.

She does miss the way it used to be, despite herself. The adoring, trusting, near-obsessive way he used to treat her, like anything she did or said was absolutely good and right. Not that Church didn't love her, or believe in her, or any of that. But Church could live without her, and she always had the feeling that Alexander couldn't. Not a feeling so much as a fantasy, probably, but she wanted it to be real anyway.

“Fine,” he says finally. “Whatever you want.”

Eliza laughs, mostly so she won't scream. “That isn't what I said, that's not what I —”

He cuts her off with a kiss, pulling her back down, back into him, holding her tight but never enough to leave a mark. He still wants her, she still has that. Not that that's such a victory, not with who he is; Alexander, who wants and wants and wants and wants, more than she or anybody has to give.

But still. For these few minutes, taking what she has to offer, the last remnants of possibilities that never really were — it's almost enough.

Eliza slumps back, after, rests an arm over her eyes, and tries to catch her breath, focuses on each shuddering inhale and painful exhale. She can just barely hear Alexander talking, but it feels far away. Everything feels too sharp, too bright — she thought she might feel better in the aftermath but if anything she's more tense.

“Eliza!” he says urgently, and only when she tries to sit up does she realize that she's crying, so hard she can't respond.

Because it’s not enough, and it’s never going to be, and she’s doing this awful, horrible thing for what, then? Because she has a crush she can’t let go of? Because she wants to be someone else for a couple hours, the Eliza that he would have picked? How fucking unfair is that, she thinks through another sob, that this is all because a twenty five year old decided after three minutes of conversation that he liked Angelica better. Because Eliza wouldn’t have said anything, and she never did. She didn’t tell Angelica about her feelings, she wouldn’t have expected her to give him up. She wouldn’t do that. She couldn’t — she can’t even picture herself trying to find the words to ask Angelica to step aside. She could never do that, and live her entire life knowing that she stole that from her sister.

But Eliza would, apparently, sleep with him ten years later. Repeatedly. She always thought she loved Angelica too much to infringe on her happiness, but it turns out that Eliza’s more selfish than even she thought she could be. She can’t believe how fucking stupid she’s being, hurting her sister and her husband and risking the happiness of her family over what? A few hours with Alex here and there? He was right, when he said that no matter how hard she tried, no matter how sure she was that she wouldn’t get caught, she couldn’t ignore the fact that she was actually doing this.

Turns out that she could, just not for as long as she thought she could. Glad it finally caught up with her, months later, while she’s still in bed with him, crying like somehow she’s the victim in this situation. Eliza spares a second to think how ridiculous this is, wrapping her arms tight around herself and trying to calm herself down. Alex reaches for her again, looks like he might also start crying when she flinches away.

“Eliza,” he pleads, “what's wrong? What can I do, please, I don't know what —”

“Just go, please.” She knows he's losing it without anything to do to make her better, but she can't deal with him right now.

“ _Eliza_.”

“No, you have to go,” she says shakily.

“I'm not just gonna leave you like this.”

“I have to go, I have to pick up John and Anne, I have to —” she chokes off around another sob, heavy in her chest.

“I'll get them, it's fine,” he says quickly. “Me and Ang— we're on your emergency contact list, right?”

Eliza nods, she can't quite get the words out. Angelica’s the first name on that list, her husband a natural second. Of course Alex is there. He's her kids’ uncle. God, what the _fuck_ is she doing?

“Okay, I'll get them. Come here, sit up,” he says softly, pulling her upright gently. He holds out her shirt, helps her guide her shaking hands through the arms, smooths it carefully over her back. “Ricky's with your mom?”

“Yeah,” she whispers, sits back against the headboard with her knees drawn up to her chest. “She's bringing him back around dinner time.”

“Okay. I'll be right back, okay?”

She watches him disappear into the hall, already back in his clothes from work, and she feels so stupid she could die. It's pathetic. They've been doing this for how many months now, and she decides to finally grow a conscience when it suits her? She didn't cry when she got into bed with Church after the first time, nor when Angelica thanked her for taking the time to talk to Alex, nor any other of the thousand million moments a decent person would have felt something.

But no, it's today. A perfectly average Thursday afternoon. Everyone else she knows is at work, doing important things, and Eliza can't even pick up her children from school because her affair with her brother in law got a little too real.

Alexander comes back with a glass of water and a banana, but her hands are still shaking too hard to take it. He holds the base while she tries to take a sip, politely not looking her in the eye.

“You gotta go now,” she says hoarsely. “There's sometimes traffic.”

“I will.” He gets up and shrugs back into his jacket, still on the floor where she threw it earlier.

“Thanks,” she says, all she can manage through the sobs threatening to tear her throat open again.

He looks alarmed, but she shakes her head and he drops it. “Where's your phone? Do you have it?”

She looks aimlessly around the room. It's probably here somewhere, it was in her pocket before.

“Got it,” he says, grabbing her left hand and closing her fingers around it. “Call or text me if you need anything.”

She nods. His hand hovers an inch over her face, suddenly hesitant — he bites his lip and reaches forward to carefully wipe under her eyes.

“I'll be _right_ back,” he promises, looking over his shoulder while he leaves. “It'll barely be twenty minutes.”

“Okay,” she says to the empty room.

She sits there for a few more minutes. Her phone buzzes — _Reminder: Pick up John and Anne!_ — and she makes herself get up and strip the bed. She doesn't have to remake everything today, no one goes in here or in the other guest bedrooms, but she should at least wash the sheets.

She goes back to the bedroom she and Church share and lays down, curls into his side of the bed. She wants him here, she wishes he wasn't gone. He so rarely is, a day or two here and there, but most of the time he's here and she doesn't really know what to do without him.

She wishes Alexander was still here, too, though she knows she shouldn't.

 _Hi baby_ , she sends to Church. _How's Germany?_

He replies almost instantly, and she could cry, she's so relieved. _Hello, love! It's alright, weather is lovely but I've been inside all day. I did take some photos of the Rathaus-Glockenspiel for the kids._

_Send them to me!_

Church sends six similar photos of the enormous clock thing and street signs written in German, one of him attempting typically badly to get himself in the shot. She replies with a string of heart eye emojis and I miss you.

_I miss you too, darling. You should come with me next time, these things are only ever bearable when you're here._

_I would love that!!!!! Let's go somewhere like we used to_

_Name it, lovely, and we’ll go._

She smiles at her phone. She can’t believe how lucky she got, to have someone that can make her feel better so easily, just by being himself.

_I have to go to dinner now. Will I see you and the kids later?_

_Of course! Let me know when you're back at your hotel._

_Will do. I love you._

_I love you too_ , she sends back, rolls onto her back and closes her eyes, letting the remaining tension slip away. They should plan something, like they used to before they had the kids. They haven’t had time for just the two of them in a while, and she misses it. Misses him. They should at least go to dinner or something when he gets back.

She gives herself a few more minutes to re-center, gets up and fixes her hair, checks under her eyes — she rarely wears makeup during the week, so she looks fine, if a bit tired — and goes downstairs.

John and Anne’s heads poke up over the back of the couch immediately when they hear her footsteps, Philip and Rachel a half second behind. “Mommy, are you sick?” Anne asks. “Uncle Alex said we had to be quiet because your head hurt.”

“He picked us up from school,” John adds. “Ms. Duncan said it was okay because he isn’t a stranger.”

“She was right, it was okay. Thank you guys for being so quiet. I feel much better now,” she says. “Are you hungry?”

“Uncle Alex made sandwiches. John didn’t eat his carrots,” Anne tells her seriously. “Philip didn’t either.”

“I wasn’t hungry for those,” Johnny says, glaring at his sister. “I _prefer_ —” his word of the week, picked up from his father on the phone — “the green peppers, but we didn’t have any.”

“That’s okay, we’ll just have some good vegetables with dinner,” Eliza says, pushing his hair out of his face. He’ll need a haircut soon. They should probably do that before the summer. Church can take him this weekend or something.

Alex has his laptop out on her kitchen table, and he’s not looking at her, but he hasn’t moved since she came downstairs.

“Hi.”

He starts typing quickly, a transparent attempt to seem like he wasn’t watching her every move. “Hey.”

“Thanks for getting them.” Is this normal? Is this what her voice normally sounds like? Will the kids notice?

“It’s no problem.” He clears his throat, risks a glance at her out of the corner of his eye. “Are you feeling better?”

She considers. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Good. That’s good.”

She doesn’t respond, opens the fridge and looks aimlessly at the contents, tries to come up with something to make for dinner. She probably should have gone grocery shopping earlier, but she ended up spending more time with Alex than she had planned for and then crying like a baby, so. She can figure something out.

“Do you want me to go?” Alex asks suddenly. “I can go, or I can work from here, or I can help with whatever, just let me know.”

Eliza shrugs. “You can go. I’m fine, and I’m sure you have stuff to do.”

“I do, but if you need —”

“I’m fine,” she says. “Go.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” She's absolutely sure she wants him to stay, she doesn't want to be by herself and it's not like she can explain this particular breakdown to literally anyone else in her life, but he has to go. Alex isn't her husband, it's not his job to take care of her. She shouldn't expect (or want) him to.

“Okay.” He closes his laptop with a click, throws it in his bag and slings it over his shoulder with practiced ease. “Schuyler-Hamiltons, say bye to your cousins. Let’s roll.”

“Do we _have_ to?” Rachel asks, dark eyes wide and imploring. “We could stay for a little bit longer, I think.”

“No, angel, I think we have to go,” Alex says. “You’ll see Anne at dance tomorrow.”

“Ugh, okay,” she says, like it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to her, but she collects her backpack and comes over to hug Eliza goodbye anyway.

“Thank you for having us, Aunt Eliza,” Philip says solemnly. “I hope your head feels better.”

Eliza smothers a smile and accepts his careful hug. She’ll have to tell Angelica the manners lessons are working. “Thank you, Philip.”

There's a beat where Alex clearly considers kissing her on the cheek, like he does when other people are around, like normal family members do, but he stops himself, giving her an awkward sort of wave instead before he leaves.

The house is a lot quieter without two extra kids, and it’ll still be another hour before her mother drops Ricky back off. Church will be at dinner, drinking and dealing, for a while, and she doesn’t want to bother him. She picks up her phone, halfway to calling Angelica before she remembers, and then she feels too anxious to try Peggy. Eliza has other friends, allegedly. She could text Adri, but it's already late over there.

She wants Church to be home. She wants Alex to still be here. She wants to be able to call her sister and not worry that she's hurt her.

Eliza puts down her phone, and resolves to spend the rest of the night alone. She's used to not getting what she wants.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She's happy now, and she was happy before, and she's going to keep being happy, she decides. This pretend thing between the two of them isn't worth ruining the life she loves. She's known that all along, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> apologies for the delay, our lives got crazy and we fear endings/change. but thank you all so much for reading, and we hope you enjoyed the ride! we certainly did.
> 
> a loving reminder (plea) to come talk to us on tumblr anytime: [madeline](http://derevko.tumblr.com/) & [emily](http://iaintinapatientphase.tumblr.com/)
> 
> the end!

Alex doesn't come over the next Tuesday. Eliza doesn’t text him. She can’t tell if she’s disappointed or relieved.

\---------

Eliza calls Angelica when she knows she’s on her lunch break at the firm. As usual, she answers on the second ring, as quick as she can pick it up. “What’s up, babe? I have twenty minutes.”

“I’ll be less than that,” Eliza promises, “Church and I are going to Buenos Aires next week.”

“Did you just decide this, or was it planned?” Angelica asks, crunching on her salad.

“We thought of it last night. We haven’t been on a trip in a while, just the two of us.”

“Yeah, in the summer you guys had the kids with you.”

Eliza can’t be positive, not over the phone, but it sounds almost like Angelica is smiling knowingly, the _oh that Eliza!_ expression she hates so much. She presses on. “Mommy and Daddy are going to watch the kids, but in case anything happens in school—”

“I got it. Or Alex will.”

“Thank you, Gel. Is everything okay with you?”

“You know, the usual. Depositions, briefs, grown people acting like fools.”

“Peggy’s still on for our Friday mani-pedis if you are.”

“After this week I’m going to need it. You wouldn’t believe how rough handling all these briefings are on your hands.”

Eliza takes a deep breath and reminds herself that Angelica’s not baiting her. No one knows how much not working weighs on her— no one but Alex, now. Church would’ve been the first person to encourage her to pursue whatever she wanted, and Angelica would’ve been second, she knows this, but it doesn’t always feel that way.

But Angelica doesn’t know that, because Eliza hasn’t told her. Angelica, who would do everything in her power to help her sister succeed, who would be nothing but encouraging. Angelica, who has always been effortlessly brilliant, who has always been certain of exactly what she should do.

She exhales. “I bet. I won’t keep you from your lunch. Talk to you later?”

“Will do. Love you, Bets.”

“I love you, too. Bye.” Eliza hangs up. She wasn’t worried about telling Angelica or her parents, and Peggy had only requested that she bring back a jar of dulce de leche. But Alex is going to hear it from Angelica, and she knows he’s going to see it as a personal affront that she didn’t tell him.

And he does. On Sunday he asks Church loudly and repeatedly about their plans in Buenos Aires. Church answers enthusiastically each time— yes, they plan on taking a tango lesson, and they’re staying at the Four Seasons, does anyone have any special requests for souvenirs?

As usual, Alex is soured by his inability to make Church react to his douchery, so he scowls in Eliza’s direction instead. “Church,” he booms, “When are you two lovebirds jetting off?”

“Monday morning, old sport, right after we take the children to school.”

“It is cheaper to fly out on a Monday morning,” Peggy jumps in, sharing _what the fuck_ looks with her sisters. “So good choice.”

“Would you two like to come along? Make it a couples holiday? It’d be no trouble at all to call the booking agent.” Church is so sincere in his offer, so good and sweet, his hand already going to his phone.

“God, I don’t think poor Tina deserves a week with our brood, no matter how much we paid her,” Angelica says, shaking her head. “And miss a whole week of work? You know he’d never make it,”

“Yeah, cause we have _work_ ,” Alex says with just a little too much vitriol. “Actual jobs.”

“Yeah,” Angelica echoes. “Court dates and meetings already scheduled. But thanks for the invite, Church.”

Eliza’s blood boils. “And we all know how the city couldn’t survive a week without you two,” She knows exactly how disproportionate her anger is to the scenario, just as she knows that Alex’s jab was meant for Church, not for her, but it hits her just the same. “What with your important, _actual_ jobs.”

There is a long, awkward moment, before Peggy jumps in again, this time with, “Speaking of jobs, did you guys read about the planet 4.2 light years away that’s in the habitable zone? That’s really cool. Alex, you love alien conspiracy theories. Think of the ammunition you have now.”

“It’s just ridiculous to think we’re alone in the universe,” he mutters.

“It’s true, especially when there are planets in the habitable zone. And it’s like, circling the sun’s next door neighbor star.”

Angelica looks at her youngest sister. “You’re gonna tell the kids, aren’t you?”

“Hell _yes_ I am, you know how I love a good space frenzy. How else am I going to get them to ask _me_ to take them to the space exhibits in the Natural History Museum?”

They plan to go that weekend, the whole group of them, the kerfuffle smoothed over.

“Was it wrong of me, to invite the Schuyler-Hamiltons along?” Church asks later, when they’re reading in bed. “It seemed rude not to.”

“It was not wrong of you at all,” Eliza says, putting her book down, “You were being sweet. Alex just took it the wrong way because he’s him.”

“They should try to get away, even for the weekend. Maybe that should be our Christmas gift this year. Then they can’t refuse.”

“We’ll see,” Eliza says. She rolls onto her side to look at him. “Doesn’t it bother you, when he does that?”

Church reflects for a moment. “I suppose it could,” he says, “But I don’t see any percentage in letting it do so. For good or ill, he’s my brother-in-law, so why not let petty peccadilloes go?”

“Because sometimes you should just clobber him.”

He smiles. “Now, that would be a sight, wouldn’t it? The two of us, locked in a brutal show of strength.”

“I’m _serious_. Not about the clobbering thing, but— you shouldn’t… let him get away with being so horrible. Not that I want you to fight with him, or anything ridiculous like that, but… he and Angelica can both be so superior about everything, it’s so obnoxious.”

“It can be,” he agrees. “They shouldn’t act that way.”

“It’s not a big deal, or whatever. I love them, I accept that they can be assholes. They just shouldn’t be able to get away with it so easily.”

“Would you feel better if we spoke to them about it?”

“No,” Eliza sighs, “They’d only want to talk back about it, obnoxiously.” And they would. They’d talk circles around her, showing off, and nothing would change.

“Families can be trying,” Church says, putting his book on his nightstand and holding his arm out for her. Eliza curls up next to him, her head tucked in the crook of his neck. All families can be trying, but it's worse, so much worse, when you're lying to everyone. She pushes the thought away and squeezes Church to acknowledge she heard him. She stays still as he turns out the light, and tries to will her thoughts away.

\---------

Argentina is beautiful, and the trip is everything Eliza hoped it would be. She and Church see everything, and do everything, and stay up as late as they want and sleep as late as they want. They FaceTime with the kids every night, and Eliza sends pictures to ‘ _the best people you know_ ,’ which was currently the title of the Schuyler Sister group chat, which changes every few days when one of the sisters had a better idea— Peggy thinks ‘ _Pleiades_ ’ is amazing and so does everyone else, but they can’t let her just have such an important victory.

When they come back, there are only a few weeks left of school, filled with end of year activities for the kids. Once school ends the last week of June, Eliza is busy taking the kids to their camp, and lessons, and activities once they get into the swing of summer. She takes her kids and her niece and nephews to museums and parks, or they go upstate to the lakes, or out to the Hamptons. It’s fun and exhausting, and Eliza drops into bed every night completely worn out.

“Hey,” Angelica says, sliding into the chair next to her, waiting for the girls to finish ballet. “Did you see Alex yesterday?”

“Uh, no?” she answers quickly, heart pounding. “Why?”

Angelica sighs. “I told him you guys were visiting Peg at the museum and tried to gently suggest that he stop by. Didn’t show, though?”

“Oh, right,” Eliza says, tries to be casual. “Nope. He didn’t.”

“Of course not. Thanks for taking mine with you.”

“No worries, we had fun,” she says. Angelica’s digging in her purse for something, not even looking at her, but she still feels on edge: split open and exposed. “Is everything alright?”

“It’s fine, I guess.”

“Angelica.”

“Eliza,” she says, mimicking her disapproving tone. “Sorry. Alex has just been more stressed out than usual the past couple weeks.”

“The thing with the bill?” Eliza asks. She knows all about it, not that Alex told her himself. Not like he used to. Peggy got the earful instead — she does a very good listening face. Eliza’s barely gotten more than three words from Alex since she and Church left for Argentina.

“Yep. You know how obsessive he gets. Sits down at the computer at 7:00AM and barely notices until twelve hours have passed. I thought about signing him up for personal training middays just to get him to walk around, but I can’t risk him accidentally getting obsessed with that and becoming some CrossFit douchebag.”

Eliza laughs, genuinely — she can picture it exactly. “God, could you imagine? He’s so competitive, he’d be on TV at those stupid competitions just to outdo the guy next to him in the locker room.”

“A nightmare,” Angelica agrees. “So I’ve been sticking to random interruptions to get him out into the real world every once in a while. Feel free to use him if you have any errands. He’s been grocery shopping like twenty times this month, even though I’m too busy to cook until this case is over.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Eliza says, but Angelica’s already turned her attention back to her phone.

That was okay, right? She didn’t suspect anything. Eliza tries to stay relaxed, not fidget or draw attention to herself. Angelica will know Eliza’s uncomfortable, and then she’ll ask, because she’s a good sister and cares, and then Eliza will have to lie, and Angelica will know she is, and Eliza will have ruined everything.

She already has, it’s just that no one knows it, and Eliza will keep it that way if it kills her. Angelica doesn’t deserve to be hurt by Eliza’s selfishness; Church shouldn’t suffer because she wanted something she couldn’t have.

She tries her best to shove it back out of her head, plays idly with her ring and checks the clock. The girls will be out soon, then it’s dinner and baths and bed, and something fun to do tomorrow. It’s getting nice out, they could go to the park for a bit. Anne’s been dying to break in that new bike of hers.

“Liza, I gotta go. I’ll see you Sunday?”

“Hmm?” She looks up, confused. “Do you need me to take Rach home?”

“No? Alex is here. I have some things to finish at the office, but I left my glasses at home, so he stopped by home to grab them.”

“Oh,” she says, trying not to look for him. She forces herself to snap out of it. “Don’t work too late, it’s not good for you. Call me tomorrow if you’re not too busy.”

“You got it. Love you.”

“Love you too,” Eliza says, kisses her on the cheek and sits back down, digs her own silent phone out and pretends that she isn’t watching Angelica and Alex in the corner of her eye. The way his face lights up when he sees her, how Angelica relaxes instantly when he’s close by. Eliza watches them on the other side of the room, huddled in a stray corner in their own little world, tracking each minute change of expression. She never used to be able to stand seeing them like _that_ before. She can admit it was jealousy, now, even if she used to just insist that she was giving them privacy. “I don’t need to know that much about anyone’s marriage,” she used to say to Peggy when she wanted to eavesdrop. “Especially not my sister’s.”

But now she wants to know. She wants to know if she was right, for all those years, when she privately believed that there was a part of him that was just hers. That she understood him better than Angelica could, who was too blinded by their similarities, and unappreciative of everything he could be.

She’s wrong, and she always has been, she knows that now. Eliza supposes she's known that all along, if she's being honest. She doesn't recognize anything about Angelica’s Alexander. There's nothing familiar in the way he looks at Angelica, their heads tipped together, the words they’re conquering the world with thrumming electric in the air. He doesn't talk to Eliza like that, not now, not before, not ever — and why would he? There’s a reason he chose Angelica, there’s a reason they work so well together. They both deserve to be understood, entirely and completely, and that’s what they’ve found in each other.

Angelica kisses Alex goodbye, and he comes over to take her seat. “Hey,” he says, casual, doesn’t look her in the eye.

“Hi,” she says softly. “They’re almost done. They’re gonna show us the recital dance before we go.”

“Great. Then I can see it for the thousand and second time this week,” he says, put upon, but he’s smiling. “Rachel’s been doing it non stop. If I have to hear that song one more time — either way, the Wizard of Oz is banned from our household forever.”

“I keep ‘forgetting’ to put it on my phone so we can listen on the way home,” Eliza confesses. “Only two more weeks until the recital and hopefully the last of it.”

“I hope and pray,” he agrees. “What color tutu did Annie get?”

“Blue.”

“Yikes. Rach got yellow. You got the meltdown, too?”

“Did we ever. _Real_ ballerinas have pink ones, it doesn’t even match her dolls, none of the girls in the book have blue ones, and so forth.”

He laughs. “Yeah, it was bad. I had to show her pictures of some professionals in different colored outfits to get her to calm down.”

“That worked?”

“Until it actually came in the mail and she decided it was ugly.”

“Oh, poor thing,” Eliza says. “We’re gonna get Annie a little doll one in blue, I’ll order one for Rachel. That way they can all match.”

“You are heaven sent, I swear,” he says dramatically, and they both laugh, together. Easy.

The dance teacher waves them in a minute later, and the girls are adorable and all beam at their parents’ applause. Rachel and Anne whisper excitedly about their dress rehearsal next week while she and Alex help them into their coats. Eliza waves when they part ways at the end of the street, and it feels good, to do something she doesn’t have to lie about. To like Alex, genuinely, and not have everything _else_ wrapped up in it.

Eliza and Alex can't take back what they've done, they can't erase their betrayal. But she thinks that maybe they can get past it. The questions have been answered, the hypotheticals pursued. She doesn't have to wonder anymore if she was imagining him looking back at her, doesn't have to worry it was all in her head. And it's nice, honestly, to know that it really wasn't her. She wasn't defective, or deficient, or less than. It just worked out this way — and she wouldn't change anything, honestly. She loves Church, so much she can't even begin to describe it, and she knows without a shadow of a doubt that Alex feels the same for Angelica.

Sure, maybe in another world things might have been different. But she can't find it in herself to regret the might have beens anymore. She's tired, honestly, of lying and hiding, of the emotional roller coaster she's spinning around on, and for what? Her life is already near perfect, and she's chasing after some impossible _everything_ that she's realizing she might not even want. That she doesn't need.

She's happy now, and she was happy before, and she's going to keep being happy, she decides. This pretend thing between the two of them isn't worth ruining the life she loves. She's known that all along, too.

\---------

“Shall we now, darling?” Church says to her quietly, his head tilted towards hers. It’s the weekly family brunch, and Church is smiling so sweetly she can’t bring herself to tell him to wait a bit longer, to tell everyone individually, quietly.

He taps his knife smartly against his water glass three times, and everyone, children included, fall silent. “Eliza and I have a bit of an announcement to make,” he starts, and that’s all it takes before Angelica has jumped out of her seat to come hug her, and her parents are beaming across the table, and Alexander has upset his orange juice all over the table.

“Daddy, that was silly,” she hears Philip tell him, but she can’t hear his response, because Angelica is asking when she’s due, and Peggy has her arm around Church, teasing that they’re on an every two years schedule.

“We’re unintentionally predictable,” Church answers. “At least in some things, aren’t we, Eliza?”

“Don’t point that out, or they’ll forget our elopement,” she tells him, standing so that she can properly hug her mother.

The rest of the day goes by quickly. Everyone wants to give their opinion on what she’s having, and what they should name it— her mother thinks that Johannes would be a wonderful name for a boy, after her father, despite the fact that two of her children are already named John and Anne. When the children were asked, John thought Thor would be a good choice, while Anne suggested Purple, or Angelina Ballerina. Ricky had just laughed.

Alexander is waiting outside the house when Eliza returns with Ricky from their Mommy and Me class. Johnny and Annie won’t be home from camp til later this afternoon. He doesn't look up from his phone until they're right in front of him. She takes Ricky out of the stroller and looks at Alex. “Bring the stroller inside for me, please,” she says as she unlocks the door.

She braces herself for a moment when she hears Alex coming into the kitchen. Ricky, who usually only gets to watch TV when his brother and sister are watching their allotted hours on the weekend, is delighted to sit down in front of Thomas the Train with a bowl of sliced fruit in the other room, oblivious to his uncle and his hangdog expression.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she says to him. “Do you want something to drink?”

“No,” he says, and she shrugs and goes to pour herself a glass of water. “Eliza—”

“It’s not yours,” she tells him before he can say anything else, “So you can just get that out of your head right now.”

“How do you know?” he asks, and she has to swallow water fast to keep from choking.

“How do I _know_?” she asks incredulously. “How do _I_ know? I was there.”

“But you can’t really know—” he persists, despite her murderous look.

“Except I _can_ , and I _do_ , and we weren’t— I was in Argentina when I got pregnant, so you’re in the clear.”

It’s the wrong thing to say, she realizes immediately— it sounds like she’s pushing him away on purpose, like she’s hiding something. His face hardens.

“Eliza,” he starts, “If this is our—”

“Just stop. It's not.”

“But if it is— I'd do right by you. By them.” He looks so stupidly noble, so unfortunately earnest, that Eliza doesn't know what to do. She knows just enough about his deadbeat father to know how viscerally guilty he feels at the idea of an unacknowledged child.

“I know you would,” she says gently, “I do. But you don’t have to, because it’s not necessary.”

“Eliza,” he tries again, and she shakes her head.

“You’re going to make yourself crazy. Even if—” She looks down for a second, and then back up, smoothing her hair back into its ponytail. “Don’t do something stupid and pretend it’s nobility. This baby is my husband’s.”

He changes tactics immediately. “But what about what you said, about going back to work? You were so close, Eliza, just a few more years—”

“It’s still just a few more years, Alex, don’t be so dramatic.”

“At least another six.”

“And so what? I’m not a prisoner, or someone without a choice. I want this, Church wants this, and if I change my mind about going to work, I will.”

“You want more for yourself. _I_ want more for you.”

“It's not about what you want,” Eliza says tightly. “It’s not about _you_ , at all.”

“I love you,” Alexander says abruptly.

Eliza freezes for a second before she starts to laugh, hard and hysterical and hurting all over. It’s a Tuesday morning, her son is in the next room talking at the TV, and her brother in law thinks that he’s in love with her.

“Eliza?”

“Get out,” she says finally. “You have to go. This is absurd.”

“No, it’s not. I love you.”

“Do _not_ say that ever again,” she says sharply. “You don’t mean that.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Shut up!” She takes a deep breath and forces her hands out of fists, flat on the counter, looks up at him as plainly as she can manage. “What am I supposed to do with that?”

“I —” he pauses. She doesn’t know how she ever thought that he was so smart, she thinks cruelly. “I don’t know, I guess. I just wanted to tell you.”

“For what? What did you imagine would happen?” She crosses her arms over her chest and waits.

“I’m just trying to do the right thing.”

“I’m not going to marry you.”

“That’s not what —”

“I don’t want —” she takes another breath, tries not to shake, not in front of him. “I don’t want what you and Angelica have. I don’t want that. I’m not her.”

He looks pissed, finally, something other than pathetic. “No, you’re not. I wasn’t asking.”

“Well, good. So why would you say that?” she demands.

“Because it’s true.”

“It’s not, but it doesn’t matter anyway. What difference does it make? Do you really think that makes this better?”

“It doesn’t make it better. It makes it— this is real, Eliza.”

“Stop,” she tells him, “None of this is real. You love Angelica, and I love Church and—”

“And I love you. And you love me— you can say it, Eliza.”

She shakes her head. She can’t, because once she says it, it’s too real. What she feels for Alex is unlike anything else, but only because she can’t let herself feel it. She has, these past few months, but the time has come for it to end. She's ready to let it end. “Please, Alex.”

He stands next to her, his chest against her shoulder. “Eliza,” he says, so gently her heart aches. “Just once.”

He has always asked for too much, always grasped with both hands, always demanded and strived for more than his share. “Alexander,” she says, meeting his eyes, her heart in her throat, “Don’t make me say it.”

“Eliza—”

“Don’t make it harder than it already is.”

He leans against her, his forehead to her temple. “Okay,” he says, “Okay.” He puts his arms around her and exhales, his breath ruffling her hair.

“Don’t cry,” she warns, her voice tight.

“Shut up.”

“Don’t fucking cry, I mean it.”

“You’re awful.” He kisses her cheekbone and then the apple of her cheek. “I can’t help what I feel.”

She leans into him for a moment, his lips against her face, and tries to memorize the sensation. She won’t have this again, not like this.

“I know,” she says. “Just— be still, for a moment.”

And he is, until she pulls away. He leaves not long after.

\---------

For Labor Day they go out to the Hamptons for one last hurrah before closing the house up. Everyone always talks about renting out their own houses for the summer, but each year they cram into the Schuylers’ home, the girls in their old rooms, the kids in two sets of bunk beds and two trundle beds. It doesn’t work well long-term, but for long weekends it’s perfect, and the kids have so much fun it’s hard not to spend as much time there as possible.

The Sunday before Labor Day everyone goes out on the boat but Eliza, who gets queasy even looking at the boat bobbing at the dock, and Alex, who never learned to sail and has no interest. They wave at their families as _The Schuy’s the Limit_ sails off, and go back up to the house quietly.

Alex sits first in the living room, and she follows, sitting beside him on the couch.

“How have you been feeling?” he asks quietly, as though it’s Christmas Eve again, and the rest of the house is asleep.

“Well enough,” she answers. “Tired, mostly. And the idea of going out on the water—”

“Same,” he says. “Though that’s always the case for me.”

She hums in agreement, and lets her head drop to his shoulder. There’s a beautiful breeze off the water that comes in through the open windows, the white curtains fluttering, and the wind chimes her mother loves so much are sounding delicately from the porch. The family must be having a wonderful time on the boat, and she says as much.

He huffs a laugh that ruffles her hair. “Yeah,” he says, “they like that stuff.”

She had tried to forget what it was like with Alex, being like this, when they were still. She had wanted to forget it. It doesn’t sting like it has— it’s a pleasant memory of a time gone, unsullied by reality or bitterness. They had once been close a certain way, but there still is the kindred spirit found in one another. It has its own sweetness to it.

“Do you need anything?” Alex asks just after she starts to doze off.

“No. This is nice.”

He leans his head against hers. “It is,” he agrees. “But seriously, you don’t need water? A snack?”

“No,” she says again. “You’re sweet.”

“It comes and goes.”

She nods, a little, and the next thing she knows her head is being moved as Angelica slides next to her. “Hey,” Angelica says, smelling like fresh sea air, “Nice nap?”

“I must have— oh, god, fallen asleep on poor Alex.”

Her sister laughs. “He’s had worse happen to him. And done worse, honestly.”

“Rude,” Alex says from the kitchen, and Angelica laughs as the back door closes.

“How was the excursion?” Eliza asks, putting her head on Angelica’s shoulder.

“Amazing. We got to see a pod of dolphins, the kids absolutely lost it.”

“Where are they?” She can just hear the din of their little voices outside.

“In the pool. They wanted one last good swim in before we head back to the city. “

“Do they need us?”

“I tagged Alex in, so I think they’re good.”

“Hm. I probably shouldn’t nap more.”

“You should nap exactly as much as you need to. You know the drill.”

“Naps are really good,” Eliza admits.

“Get ‘em while you can,” Angelica advises, and takes the remote to channel surf, cackling happily when she lands on a rerun of _Jeopardy_. Eliza shifts to stretch out on the couch, her head in her sister’s lap, and Angelica cards her fingers through Eliza’s hair as she answers every question correctly.

\---------

Catherine Angelica is born on a Thursday morning, looking just like her older siblings. Peggy and the Schuylers are looking after them, and had brought them all to meet their new sister earlier in the day. Angelica and Alexander get a sitter for their three and come after dinner, and Angelica heads right for her sister, hugging her around the baby in her arms.

“Did you decide on Kitty or Katie?” Angelica asks the parents, though her voice is high as she takes the baby from Eliza.

“We think we’ve settled on Katie, haven’t we, love? Your mother is Kitty, after all.” Church says, beaming with pride as he goes over to clap a hand on Alexander’s back.

Eliza nods. “I think she looks like a Katie, too.”

“A Katie Angelica,” Angelica coos to Katie, “I finally got my namesake.”

“Good, so you can stop making me feel bad about it.”

“I’m just saying, Anne Margarita happened almost five years ago. That’s all I have to say.”

Eliza rolls her eyes, and catches Alexander’s eyes over Church’s shoulder. She’s barely seen him these past few months, as she skipped some of the family events to rest, and he’s been busy with work. He’s looking at her the way he always used to— like she was saint in a chapel, and he feels like he should live up to her.

She looks at her husband, and her sister, and doesn’t look back.


End file.
